Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PriceZombie is shutting down

pricezombie.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 219 posts

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#181

Post by sangnoir »

meritt wrote: post #136
djsumdog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably just haven't been caught yet. Amazon is massive and has tons of people who use their Affiliate API. There's probably a small enforcement team that looks at stuff like this. Price Zombie might have just gotten large enough to show up on their radar.

CCC has been around for a very long time. That seems very unlikely they 'haven't been caught yet'.

Well, PriceZombie was around for a long time too and they 'hadn't been caught' until recently. So maybe it's not unlikely

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#182

Post by nommm-nommm »

InsideTrack wrote: post #70
fweespee_ch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. I also deal with Amazon on a seller's platform and can confirm this. It doesn't matter who you know, the company itself is bipolar and unreliable.

As a fellow third party seller on Amazon - I am astonished by how dysfunctional and unreliable Amazon is. I cant imagine relying on FBA for my main source of income because Amazon is so fickle. For example - I have had an item in reserve [1] in their warehouse since Jan 18th!! I opened a case about it on March 4th (for those following along, that's three full weeks ago...). They just keep saying "we've contacted the warehouse and will get back to you if they can find it or not." Apparently I'm supposed to accept that items I send them are unable to be purchased for over 2 months?

It wouldn't be a big deal if this was an isolated incident but it's not.

But people continue to sell on Amazon because that is where the customers are.

[1] Reserve means an item is unable to be bought, either because it's in reserve for a customer order that hasn't shipped or its being transferred to another warehouse.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#183

Post by lazyjones »

elorant wrote: post #177

Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?

Crawling Amazon is no longer feasible if you want up-to-date prices. There's 10s of millions of pages to crawl, it takes too long. I believe they also added captchas against excessive crawling (perhaps via Tor only).

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#184

Post by subsection1h »

sangnoir wrote: post #181
meritt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCC has been around for a very long time. That seems very unlikely they 'haven't been caught yet'.

Well, PriceZombie was around for a long time too and they 'hadn't been caught' until recently. So maybe it's not unlikely

Not that it affects your argument, but camelcamelcamel has been around twice as long as PriceZomebie[1][2].

[1] https://www.facebook.com/Camelcamelcamelcom-154220361288305/...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/Pricezombie/info

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#185

Post by cookiecaper »

gberger wrote: post #50
iolothebard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They couldn't continue scraping without Amazon's permission. The CFAA makes that illegal.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#186

Post by sangnoir »

elorant wrote: post #177

Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?

It wouldn't make a difference: it is their affiliate account was that was closed - which is how they earned money. Affiliate account = getting paid "kickbacks" by Amazon for customer referalls from PZ's site that result in purchases.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#187

Post by cookiecaper »

elorant wrote: post #177

Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?

It wouldn't matter. If Amazon didn't want them accessing their servers, they could file suit under the CFAA. They could also allege copyright infringement, since judges have ruled that the temporary copy of a page stored in RAM from which factual non-copyrightable data is extracted (as would be the case on an Amazon product page) constitutes an infringing copy, and trademark infringement and dilution.

The existing body of law is very hostile to scrapers. Server access is treated like access to land. The "owner" can kick you off whenever they want.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#188

Post by sangnoir »

InsideTrack wrote: post #98
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…

1. PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon. PriceZombie indexes products and prices in over 100 online retailers. The developers always had the option of using the PZ website as a front end to gather personal shopping habits and other data that is valuable to advertising and marketing companies - which is what many (most?) price trackers do as their primary source of revenue. PZ opted to get their funding from ret…

> PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon.

Not technically for the reasons you stated. However, it is evident that PriceZombie was financially built on top of Amazon's Affiliate program. It's hard to argue against that when Amazon contributed 90% of revenue

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#189

Post by _AllisonMobley »

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 wonder how many people are emailing Mr. Bezos in response to his email address appearing here.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#190

Post by dipnuggetron »

incepted wrote: post #174
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…

Also, the problem is that 90% of their revenue apparently depended on this feed from Amazon. It's never healthy to be so dependent on one provider.

Per Fred Wilson: "Be your own bitch". Pretty much any project that is beholden to one major affiliate partner has a shaky business model and no leverage in negotiations.
Post reply on HN