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PriceZombie is shutting down

pricezombie.com

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Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#21

Post by Etheryte »

elbigbad wrote: post #8

This sucks, but unfortunately is something that is not unlikely to happen when one's whole service is hosted or relies on a third party API for its data. I recall something similar happening with a service that relied on the Google Maps API to draw coordinates or something. And Google pulled API access because the service was too similar to what Google Maps did with trip directions, or something. Unfortunately this i…

The point here is not that they're relying on a third party, but the fact that Amazon banned them from the api while their competitors/alternatives can still use it without constraint.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#22

Post by mattlutze »

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 been slapped down is only a secondary question.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#23

Post by patio11 »

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. A handful of hands were raised.

Dave McClure got frothing mad, and not his normal frothing character mad, but I think actually angry.

"LISTEN UP. 80% of you are building on these platforms. If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS. You will %(#)%#0 fail. If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me."

I don't think I'd phrase it like that, but the core message is exactly correct. The standard platform deal is, indeed, in the event of an issue you can write to an inbox that no one reads. You do not want that deal.

You should, as early as practical, identify an actual human inside the mothership and convince them to like you. You should then lateral from that actual human to other actual humans so that you do not lose your beachhead if your actual human is re-assigned. If you do not do this, when you inevitably have a problem, you will be reduced to taking it to the HN front page and hoping an actual human takes pity on you. Pity is a much less likely outcome than convincing an actual human than you are scads better than their median semi-anonymous participant in the partnership program, which is pretty easy, because their median participant is terrible and all processes are designed to treat them as such.

I am aware that this some people will perceive this as unfair because getting better-than-publicly-available access to one's business partners seems like you're at a position of advantage vis-a-vis the people who can only send mails to /dev/null. Is this an advantage? Yes. If you believe this is an unfair advantage, I would strongly counsel you to negotiate honestly and in good faith with your counterparties at your largest business partner and source of existential risk, and not worry so much about other putative businesses which are not sophisticated enough to negotiate honestly and in good with faith their core suppliers.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#25

Post by pavel_lishin »

Etheryte wrote: post #21
elbigbad wrote: post #8

This sucks, but unfortunately is something that is not unlikely to happen when one's whole service is hosted or relies on a third party API for its data. I recall something similar happening with a service that relied on the Google Maps API to draw coordinates or something. And Google pulled API access because the service was too similar to what Google Maps did with trip directions, or something. Unfortunately this i…

The point here is not that they're relying on a third party, but the fact that Amazon banned them from the api while their competitors/alternatives can still use it without constraint.

Isn't that a bit like complaining to the police officer who pulled you over that other people were speeding, too?

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#27

Post by gizmodo59 »

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.…

"identify an actual human inside the mothership"

This is so valuable. I was intrigued by who wrote this and no wonder it is Patrick. (I highly recommend this article by him: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...).

My two cents: Talk to human. Develop social skills they matter more than what you think.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#29

Post by homero »

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

That's not the problem, the problem is they needed commissions

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#30

Post by mwexler »

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 merchants. Same for Travel sites/aggregators, and for review sites: You either get folks to pay for them (of which Angie's List was the only kind of success) or you get vendors to pay you (Yelp, any affiliate aggregator (Creditcards.com, etc.), price engines).

I guess I wonder: I love CamelCamelCamel, I loved PriceZombie, I loved PriceRunner and Jango and all the rest... but they keep going away. Google killed google shopping comparisons, as did the other portals. We can probably all think of ones we used that are all gone now.

What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? And given that many merchants are creating terms of service to block displaying of their prices (we see this also in the travel industry), will one of the earliest dreams of the internet, that of a flat marketplace where I can evaluate all players and their pricing and pick the best store for me, still fail to come to life?

It feels like online shopping has become a big mall, where I have to go to as many sites as I can find til I get tired and just buy the thing at the most recent site (or just trust that Amazon is the cheapest). I hope we can avoid this fate.

(Update: fixed typos)

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