I switched to https://keepa.com/ . The alerts seem more consistent, and there's no affiliate links.
They also support the Japanese marketplace
Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#62Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long. Edit: Camel+YC fact: we pitched to YC early on, but weren't ready to give up our day jobs at the time. A few months later, we had left our jobs anyway. Not necessarily because the site was doing so well...
This looks pretty cool. Thanks for doing this for the past twelve years! Although I've only been using it for the past twelve minutes. :) Your 'about' page says: "The primary feature of our site is the sending of email alerts when prices change. The user simply sets a price threshold at which alerts are generated, and we email you when that condition is met." Just to confirm, the "price threshold" mentioned will trig…
At or below, yes. When it passes the threshold. It’s kind of the definition of “threshold”, if you think about it.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#63Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long. Edit: Camel+YC fact: we pitched to YC early on, but weren't ready to give up our day jobs at the time. A few months later, we had left our jobs anyway. Not necessarily because the site was doing so well...
Hey L1quid, great site! I have been using CCC since 2 months and it is amazing. Could you shed some light on how often do you check for price updates? I am asking because I was using it during Prime Day and it seemed like the prices were not immediately updated. Maybe this could be a new addition to the site!
Have a listen to https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/24/camelcamelca... or browse the transcript at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019... (27 page PDF)
Relevant bits - they continuously poll for new prices but they have a lot of products to request. They batch as best they can but there are request rate limits they have to respect also:
> [00:11:04] JM: Let’s talk about the core the process that you have to do. So in order to build these price models for CamelCamelCamel, there is a repeated usage of this Amazon advertising API that gives you some data on the price. Tell me how that scraping infrastructure works.
> [00:11:27] DG: Sure. So essentially what we do is build a queue of – Or multiple queues of products. We split up things in different ways by the Amazon country. Because, of course, we support all of Europe and North America. Well, Canada and the United States. So we split that up.
> We also prioritize based on user interest. Since we have a finite number of API requests, we have to try to make the most of those. So whether a product is being actively tracked by a user or not, it gets higher priority. Then we use Amazon SQS to create these queues and then we just pop things off the queues and make API requests.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#64Tip:
On Amazon, if you put an item in your basket then "save it for later" you will get notifications every time the price of that item or its availability changes.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This looks pretty cool. Thanks for doing this for the past twelve years! Although I've only been using it for the past twelve minutes. :) Your 'about' page says: "The primary feature of our site is the sending of email alerts when prices change. The user simply sets a price threshold at which alerts are generated, and we email you when that condition is met." Just to confirm, the "price threshold" mentioned will trig…
At or below, yes. When it passes the threshold. It’s kind of the definition of “threshold”, if you think about it.
That makes sense, and that's what I figured -- as I mentioned.
Thanks.
It would be nice if I could sort by price/prime availability, and get prices for Amazon Pantry items.
But I haven't contributed to this and it's provided as a free service, so that's not a complaint, just an observation/suggestion.
What the site does already is fabulous and I do appreciate it!
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#66Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long. Edit: Camel+YC fact: we pitched to YC early on, but weren't ready to give up our day jobs at the time. A few months later, we had left our jobs anyway. Not necessarily because the site was doing so well...
Please consider adding other retailers. Often times, the better deal isn't on Amazon, and there tons of online retailers out there. Price checking historically on N platforms is a much more appealing value proposition.
It is against the amazon shopping api terms of service to offer price comparison. So they haven't probably for that reason.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#67This is probably a great site if you're in the US but the prices it's returning to me here in Australia just aren't the same as on Amazon.com/au and when I try and search the local database ( https://au.camelcamelcamel.com/products?sq=red+widget ) I get this error: "This page has been temporarily disabled due to abusive traffic from someone else."
Instead of searching, try pasting in a link from the official Amazon AU site and see if that works better for you?
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#68Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long. Edit: Camel+YC fact: we pitched to YC early on, but weren't ready to give up our day jobs at the time. A few months later, we had left our jobs anyway. Not necessarily because the site was doing so well...
Do you consider it a risk, that Amazon one day can decide to turn the tap off?
They definitely do worry about that. They have had close calls before and had to negotiate with amazon to keep things going.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you consider it a risk, that Amazon one day can decide to turn the tap off?
If Amazon cuts off the tap, some other major retailer would gladly step in to supply the data in very minimal time. Referral traffic is valuable.
No other major retailer has anything close to as many skus as amazon. And for any of the sites that do have a lot of products via 3rd party sellers, most of those products are much higher priced (they are probably being drop shipped from Amazon) and those prices don't change much.
So I think ccc would lose a lot of its usefulness.
Re: Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
#7010+ years ago I wrote one of the first browser addons in this space. It was powered by a backend that crawled data for hundreds of merchants, and Amazon was easily one of the most difficult merchants to parse (and I ended up writing a lot of the parsing code). We had entire sections of our codebase dedicated to piercing Amazon's "add to cart to see the price" tactics and other countermeasures they would throw our way…
CCC is 12 years old so they must have had the same problems as you had.