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PriceZombie is shutting down

pricezombie.com

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Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#141

Post by mindslight »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #135
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides likely being less effective than saving such arguments for the magistrate, what exactly is wrong with that? It's a standard avenue of contesting a speeding ticket.

Because you're admitting that you were speeding. If you claim ignorance ("Sorry, I was too focused on traffic to glance at the speedometer"), you at least have a chance (depending on the officer's mood) of getting away with a warning.

You're "admitting" that you were going a certain speed, but not that said speed qualifies as "speeding".

I agree you're better off trying a different tack with the ticket troll, I'm just saying it's not wrong.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#142

Post by AznHisoka »

acconrad wrote: post #4

YC partner Aaron Harris had a similar problem with his first startup[1], and is a lesson for all startups: It's risky to rely on one customer for the majority of your revenue. 90% of PriceZombie's revenue was dependent on affiliate revenue, and thus Amazon. Similarly, virtually all of TutorSpree's revenue was dependent on SEO, and thus on Google, and when Google changed their algorithm, they saw a similar fate. [1] h…

This is part of the risk of startups/business. This is like the opposite of survivorship bias...

Think about all the successful companies out there that DO depend on third parties:

- Buffer (Twitter has a bad day? Cut their API access off!)

- Candy Crush (Apple hates them? Remove their apps!)

- RetailMeNot (Google thinks they're spam! Delist them!)

- DuckDuckGo (Bing hates them? Cut off their API access)

- Heroku (Amazon has a bad day? Cut off their AWS Access)

- MailPlane (Google doesn't want Gmail apps?! Cut them off!)

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

patio11 wrote: post #134
Dylan16807 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Was the mention of a tour just something that reminded him to give that advice, and it was completely unrelated to the rant? Was he assuming that anyone that wanted to go on the tour was in that situation, an assumption that makes very little sense?

In a room where he expected ~40 participants for the tour he had ~6 hands raised, which caused the core dump.

Were that many of them partnering with those particular two? And if they had really good access already they wouldn't need a new tour.

Well I'll just assume it made sense in context.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#144

Post by jtchang »

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.…

This is exactly correct. Sometimes I would like to think starting a technology business is all about the tech but in reality business is personal.

Building relationships is critical and so is maintaining them. They provide real value and if you are building on someone else's platform you better trust they won't pull the rug out from under you (or at least have a backup plan). It's totally okay to rely on a company's platform as long as you understand the risks and mitigate them. Getting a bug in someone's ear at the company is one way to reduce the risk that something will go awry.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#145

Post by Kerrick »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16
NicoJuicy wrote: post #9

Can you create this a self hosted application? Then Amazon can't really track this ( i suppose). They should suddenly start tracking thousands of affliates and you could earn some money from it :) ( i suppose) Eg. Something like https://sendy.co/ , i believe they earn plenty of money also :p

Chrome extension for scraping and affiliate link placement?

They wrote that into the Terms of Service a couple of years ago. I know because I created one before the rule change and had to remove that part.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#146

Post by MrApathy »

ikeboy wrote: post #116
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…

What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me. >What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? I've got a handful of ideas about this and have been considering a startup along these lines. I think that you need to take control of the actual purchase, so then it's just "Oh, I paid l…

> What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me.

The Google shopping that exists today is not the same service that was originally launched. It used to function more like a standard search, but limited to all online stores. So long as there wasn't a robots.txt, Google was index the site and include the product in their shopping results. So basically like standard search, but with logic to determine if a site represented a store.

Then Google modified shopping so that it was opt-in for the retailers, meaning a large number of stores were no longer included. To be included in Google shopping now a retailer must have a Google merchant/adwords account. It's more of a curated search now.

Nothing wrong with it now, but it used to be great for finding hard-to-find items or items that were mispriced by less sophisticated retailers.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#148

Post by brianwawok »

frozenport wrote: post #130

Why do they need an account? Can't they just crawl Amazon and get price info? Or is their business only viable if they can collect a percentage of your purchase?

Exactly. Affiliate is their only profit. Sure they can crawl and link, but they would get 0 profit from that.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#149

Post by Implicated »

Domenic_S wrote: post #79
AznHisoka wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The advice by patio is generally sound, though in this specific scenario, I don't think Amazon would ever care. PriceZombie offers negligible profit compared to the billions Amazon makes. Even spending 0.5 seconds on their case is a waste of their time.

I don't agree with that at all. We have to guess how much transaction volume PriceZombie sends to Amazon, but $50k/month isn't an unreasonable estimate (probably very low). It is totally worth a couple hours of a support person's time to deal with the source of $600k of annual revenue.

I wouldn't be so quick to disagree.

I spent 2 years generating over $1mil a year in sales through the Amazon affiliate program - to be dropped without warning or contact. No amount of follow up and attempts to contact my, previously very accessible, account rep resulted in anything. Not even an explanation on why my account was closed, outside of being told that I could take legal action (in the state of Washington) against Amazon to collect on the nearly $40k in yet-to-be-paid earnings.

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