name.toLower().contains("zombie") -> FAIL you FAIL
Saying fail is a lowercase fail. Saying fail with code is an uppercase FAIL.
FAIL!
PriceZombie is shutting down
81–90 of 219 posts
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the lesson at all. Even if you follow the TOS those terms can change overnight and your business will die in the same way. If you are 100% reliant on another company you're entire existence depends on that relationship.
Every business is 100% on other companies. Everyone uses electricity, has to ship product, buy resources, use devices to transform those resources etc. The problem here only really exists in these silly other parasitical web-only businesses. Yes, if you track Amazon's prices and Amazon makes that harder then you'll be on trouble. So probably best to set up 20 or so companies/services in your spare time and not take a…
Right, but those other business have alternatives if the relationship with one fails (with the exception of electricity, which is regulated and therefore a bit different.)
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#83I am going to miss their price protection tracker that emailed when the price dropped within a certain period of time following a purchase. That let me get the difference refunded by my credit card company.
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#84If your objective is to write a crawler that parses pricing information from a third party web site, then write the crawler. Relying on the third party to provide a consistent API that can be remotely communicated with is setting yourself up for failure. These companies can quickly ban you from their platform when using their API. At least by writing the crawler yourself, you're making it much more difficult for them…
> building a business model around the availability of a third party is a recipe for failure. Rather, I think it's that a business model that is not complimentary to the third party is the problem. E.g. Amazon doesn't want historical price tracking for as it could lead to folks discovering price manipulations and a decrease in margins. So, that's the issue--the business was not a compliment. Let's imagine a startup t…
Which is a great strategy, until the business releases something that duplicates your functionality and cancels your access.
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the lesson at all. Even if you follow the TOS those terms can change overnight and your business will die in the same way. If you are 100% reliant on another company you're entire existence depends on that relationship.
Every business is 100% on other companies. Everyone uses electricity, has to ship product, buy resources, use devices to transform those resources etc. The problem here only really exists in these silly other parasitical web-only businesses. Yes, if you track Amazon's prices and Amazon makes that harder then you'll be on trouble. So probably best to set up 20 or so companies/services in your spare time and not take a…
No, the problem here is that the power company can't unilaterally decide you don't get power anymore and turn it off without warning. Your shipping carrier can't suddenly decide they don't serve you anymore, and by the way we're keeping all the packages you have en route.
But Amazon can. They also pay a few months in arrears, so one day you may wake up to a form email that says essentially, "adios, and I'm keeping the money". In fairness, I believe all affiliate programs are like that.
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#86It 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…
CCC regurgitates Amazon's own customers back to them. PriceZombie tracks prices on 100+ other stores, they have a Reddit bot that is seen by millions of people every day and they have browser extensions that are used by tens of thousands of people every day. Since Amazon usually has the best price, PZ actually steered customers to Amazon. It is against Reddit's TOS to have affiliate links in bots and against the TOS of most retailers to have affiliate links in extensions - so a massive amount of business was pushed Amazon's way without any benefit to PriceZombie.
PriceZombie's failure was in not expecting Amazon to always have the best price. Not all of the online retailers they track have affiliate programs so if a few of them dropped out because they were losing business it would not be a big loss, but with 90%+ of all purchases coming from Amazon, losing them as an affiliate was a fatal blow.
But that is to the PZ site. Behind PZ is a massive, custom coded data retrieval and searchable storage system that contains three years worth of product and price data from almost every major online retailer - both the technology and data is far more valuable than the PZ website.
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#87Our 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.…
The same principle applies within larger companies. It's a lot easier to get things done once you have a guy you know in ops, a gal in DB, a buddy at the IT helpdesk...
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#88It 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…
> Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively.
I used to do that, but I've started comparison shopping at local retail stores more recently. I've found that for many of the items I was buying that are available locally, Amazon was offering the same price or higher, plus a shipping delay (and the non-trivial hassle I have to go through to pick up some packages).
Plus, retails stores tend to group similar products together and allow you to get an intuitive sense of a products physical qualities, so I think they often provide a better experience. On Amazon, it can be surprisingly hard to answer the "how big is this, really" question.
Now, if I think I can buy an item locally, I try to do that first.
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#89Earlier 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.
- (business lost to other sites with lowest price)
it's entirely possible Amazon did this math
Re: PriceZombie is shutting down
#90The 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…
You miss the point. PriceZombie was above board with what they were doing at all times. Amazon TOLD THEM that as long as their latest price was within 24 hours they could display price history like dozens of other price trackers were doing. PZ was reviewed three times, not just by low level people but higher up in the chain, and each time there was no question they were within the TOS so long as they displayed the cu…
Many of the shoppers using Price Zombie likely relied on Price Zombie's historical pricing data and notifications of price drops to delay purchases until prices for items were relatively low. The affiliate link gave Amazon data on which shoppers were using Price Zombie. Maybe someone at Amazon used their data to estimate the decrease in margins from that, causing Amazon's leadership to change its mind.