PriceZombie is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#41

Post by JustSomeNobody » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

> Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with other stores, please contact us at support@pricezombie.com

Yeah, that's really going to help your situation.

1) You built your product on top of someone else's service. That's always a rocky road. It is common to read about other companies in your shoes.

2) In the time you were operating you couldn't make a single contact at Amazon in case stuff happens?

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#42

Post by iolothebard » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

mattlutze wrote: post #22

The issue here wasn't that they were just using Amazon's API and then lost access. The Amazon TOS says don't store and display our old prices and, per the post, that's what PriceZombie was doing. The lesson is that if you're doing something in violation of a partner's TOS and start to negatively effect their business, the partner is well within their rights to cut off access. Whether other businesses have or haven't…

Exactly, you want to run something like this you have to scrape like LexisNexis, etc.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#43

Post by specialp » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days. Early on in my computer shopping days I'd hit pricewatch and buy from random vendors based on price. Eventually this company called Newegg often had the near the lowest price always and had great service. I soon went to shopping at Newegg consistently without bothering to go to pricewatch. Newegg could have raised prices slightly but I did not want to waste time with untrusted vendors.

The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#44

Post by jonknee » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #41

> Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with other stores, please contact us at support@pricezombie.com Yeah, that's really going to help your situation. 1) You built your product on top of someone else's service. That's always a rocky road. It is common to read about other companies in your shoes. 2) In the ti…

And Amazon isn't scared of the situation, they just don't want to subsidize it. Not really surprising.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#45

Post by tylercubell » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

For PriceZombie and many other businesses, depending on one major revenue source to survive can be a death sentence and at the very least pose an existential risk. Let this be a hard lesson in diversification.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#46

Post by hvo » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

Padmapper was forced to shut down too by Craigslist.When are we going to learn that this type of business model is unsustainable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#47

Post by fweespee_ch » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #23

Our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening I was once in a room with Dave McClure and a ~50ish companies he had funded. He announced that he was taking a tour of partnership teams at two members of AppAmaGooBookSoft and asked for who wanted to come with.…

I'd strongly urge that in Amazon's case this advice is functionally irrelevant as they aren't a reliable business partner that reacts in a consistent way when it comes to MWS operations regardless of who you know that works there unless its Bezos himself.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#48

Post by meritt » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

mwexler wrote: post #30

All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything. So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from mercha…

CamelCamelCamel has not went anywhere. But they also don't serve affiliate links as far as I can tell, so their revenue model (if they have one) is not dependent on an affiliate relationship.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#49

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

mwexler wrote: post #30

All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything. So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from mercha…

[deleted]

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#50

Post by gberger » Fri, Mar 25, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

iolothebard wrote: post #42

mattlutze wrote: post #22

The issue here wasn't that they were just using Amazon's API and then lost access. The Amazon TOS says don't store and display our old prices and, per the post, that's what PriceZombie was doing. The lesson is that if you're doing something in violation of a partner's TOS and start to negatively effect their business, the partner is well within their rights to cut off access. Whether other businesses have or haven't…

Exactly, you want to run something like this you have to scrape like LexisNexis, etc.

It doesn't matter how they scrape. They could continue scraping prices if they wanted to. The problem is they lost access to the Affiliates API -- which is how they make money.