Show HN: Amazon Price Monitor (weekend project) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Amazon Price Monitor (weekend project)

giacomoballi.com

61 pointsBigBalli38 comments

Please kill this popup:

> Howdy!I notice you're probable living outside the US.Unfortunately at the moment the service only checks Amazon US... Sorry!

Yes, I know I'm not in the US, and if you only check Amazon.com, that's fine - just show that you're checking 'Amazon.com'

thanks for feedback! It was just a quick add when Ik noticed a ton of people from the UK trying to use it. What would be a better way to communicate until other countries are supported? --most people don't make the connection that when I say only "Amazon.com" it refers to the country (i.e. not other retailers).

Perhaps a banner at the top of the page saying something along the lines of "We only support Amazon.com (US) at this time."

I assume he/she wants our emails?

Correct, email is necessary to send the notification.

yep ppl outside of U.S. can use parcel forwarding services...

Main point is they need to have an Amazon.com account (not just a matter of shipment).

If your affiliate account doesn't get shut down I would love to know how you got through the process.

I did a similar thing, and they shut it down every time someone made a purchase because I wasn't providing "original content". Despite my complaints that there are/were plenty of people not providing original content they said those affiliates were grandfathered in. It was an incredibly subjective process that I eventually gave up on out of frustration

I had the exact same experience with a price comparison site for a specific type of product. Got the same rejection + reason even after I spent time writing original overviews and articles about the products in question.

How is it any different than Camelcamelcamel?

I believe it's more straightforward and feel like it wasn't always reliable. Perhaps delays in their notification system, not sure.

I haven't had any issues using Camel Camel Camel for the last few years.

Additionally, I usually go there for price history when trying to figure out if now is a good time to buy or when trying to figure out what a good price threshold is to receive alerts. Without historical price info it's hard to know what a good "max price" is to set.

I've been using Camel^3 for a few years and never had any problems.

if you are thinking of monetizing this, you may run into trouble emailing links with affiliate tags (see the Associates Program Policies [0])

you might be able to circumvent the problem by linking to your site for some kind of landing page, and then linking off to amazon with an affiliate link.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies

FYI, camelcamelcamel gets around this emailing users link to a special page on their (camelcamelcamel.com) site that is just a redirect to the product page on Amazon. Users see a brief message "Thanks for using Camel Camel Camel" or something shortly before being redirected.

Unless the user takes a concrete action to confirm the redirect, that is not allowed. Under Disqualified Purchases:

> (e) any Product purchased by a customer who is referred to an Amazon Site by a link that sends users indirectly to the Amazon Site via an intermediate site, without requiring the customer to click on a link or take some other affirmative action on that intermediate site (a “Redirecting Link”),

Oh, so that's why they do it that way!

Thank you for heads-up. Didn't find anything related to "not emailing affiliate links"... Would you be able to point me to the section you're referring to?

You must not have been looking very hard. Searching for "email" on the policy page gives you:

> Responsibility for Your Site > > 5. You will not engage in any promotional, marketing, or other advertising activities on behalf of us or our affiliates, or in connection with the Amazon Site or the Associates Program, that are not expressly permitted under the Associates Operating Agreement. For example, you will not engage in any promotional, marketing, or other advertising activities in any offline manner, including by using any of our or our affiliates’ trademarks or logos (including any Amazon Mark), any Content, or any Special Link in connection with an offline promotion or in any other offline manner (e.g., in any printed material, mailing, SMS, MMS, email or attachment to email, or other document, or any oral solicitation).

Did you read the part of their policy that says you can't use the affiliate API for a price monitoring tool?

that's part of their mobile app policy

Hi everyone, this is a quick project I wanted to share. Made it for myself but then tweaked it a bit so other could use it too.

Pretty simple goal: amazon price is checked regularly and you receive an email when it is below whatever you set the trigger.

Obviously there are many additions I have in mind but will only put more time if people want me to. Works fine as-is for me.

Let me know what you think or if you break it! :)

Are you web scraping the html or are you using Amazon's API[1] with an AWS developer access key?

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/EX_...

Official API, no scraping.

Don't you need to be an affiliate bringing them a decent amount of sales before you get access to that. Usually there is a rate limit that makes it impossible to keep up with all their prices. How did you get around that?

Hey! The URL[0], shortens to the last part automatically[1], then complains "Enter a URL" when I click on Go

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSharp-27-Inch-LED-Lit-Monit...

[1] B00P0EQD1Q

thanks for letting me know! Just read the comment and have made quite a few fixes since then. I doubt it's still an issue but if you have time, I'd love to have confirmation. Thanks!

Still breaking!

Hey man, if you can't/won't design the page, just use Bootstrap. It works great and takes you 2 seconds to add.

I was sad when ebay bought decide.com so they could kill it. Check out the wayback machine for some ideas about the interfaces they used :)

So I embarked on a weekend project to teach myself node.js. It lasted a little longer than weekend project. Regardless I have some nodejs experinece and 150k amazon products. Eventually, I will move it over to Angular2, for some more coding experience. Right now it's on Codeigniter/Bootstrap.

The problem isn't as much as a coding problem, but more of marketing problem. I'm starting to think that getting people to click is more difficult than coding, lol. It does make money, but could make more.

Any growthhackers out there, would be happy to talk.

http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals

Your data is not live see http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Product/Wireless/Samsung-O...

Ugh... Caching error.

I am getting an HTTP ERROR 500.

Left an extra bracket in there while fixing other stuff. Thanks for letting me know!

AFAIK, Amazon's privacy policy does NOT allow you to do web scraping from their website. Read the policy carefully.

Is this doing that? If so, does the privacy policy even matter if no one involved has agreed to it?

good insight, but the service uses the official API. No scraping involved.

That's why they offer their API.

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