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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I recommend consulting CamelCamelCamel before making any purchases on Amazon today to verify that there wasn't a price hike before the drop. CCC lets you see the pricing history on any of the items on Amazon.

It even has a Chrome extension.[1]

[0]https://camelcamelcamel.com/

[1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-camelizer/ghno...

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Keepa [1] shows a graph at every item. It works great on Chrome and Firefox.

[1] https://keepa.com

Will this (or is there any extension) make items with multiple choices easier to browse? For example if I want to go look at a pair of shorts, the item page might offer them in 15 different colors, and they are all different prices (and even different prices by size). I'd like an extension that makes it easier to view the prices and ideally sort by cheapest first.

Good question.

I just tested that with Keepa on this phone [1] [2] [3] [4]. The charts are different for all 4 colours but personally I like it that way. Usually I have a preference for colours. However, sometimes I don't, and if I'd buy for someone else who knows? Its gonna depend. I checked the settings and was able to compare different Amazon versions (per country) but not merge colours of the same item.

With The Camelizer it shows the wrong price (I take it it grabs Amazon US price but I'm not sure).

I don't have an account on Keepa or CamelCamelCamel. Perhaps having an account gives further benefits.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/Nokia-3310-Single-Sim-Mobiltelefon-Gra...

[2] https://www.amazon.de/Nokia-3310-Single-Sim-Mobiltelefon-Gra...

[3] https://www.amazon.de/Nokia-3310-Single-Sim-Mobiltelefon-Gra...

[4] https://www.amazon.de/Nokia-3310-Single-Sim-Mobiltelefon-Gra...

I also recommend this tool for anyone looking to buy expensive items. I saved ~$900 on an OLED TV from a very brief price drop in late May due to camel. It had been on my list for months however.

link for the lazy chromist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-camelizer/ghno...

Is this better than honey Chrome extension?

just tried it, honey is about coupon/deals while camel is about price charts (my 1min summary)

thanks! will give it a try! honey also has a price chart thing (only shows when you go to an Amazon item specifically and then the Chrome extension injects it in) but I've found it only shows it when there have been recent deals so it's not always useful

I see, my minute sample wasn't enough to see that

Honey has the same basic features of camelcamelcamel, but they present it more as a warning of recent price changes than the drill down chart of ccc. I use both

Thanks, I added it to my original post.

> to verify that there wasn't a price hike before the drop.

I think it would be more useful to have an extension that just hid all the bogus discount claims.

I would like an extension to hide this and all other click bait.

Wonder how that service works. Amazon explicitly forbids keeping track of their pricing history. I knew a few guys who tried it and got a C&D warning at some time. Does ccc have a special agreement or something equivalent? Beats me.

Anyone can send a cease and desist. How would that be enforceable though? The information is available publicly to anonymous browsers.

Well-funded Amazon legal dept vs individual = not a fun time, regardless if it's found frivolous or thrown out.

It didn't really matter who's right and who's wrong. If a fortune 500 sues you, you lose even if you win.

The risk is not that the results will be impossible to gather and publish, but that they will be unprofitable.

CamelCamelCamel makes money off users clicking Amazon affiliate URLs to go to Amazon from their site. It's easy for Amazon (or anyone else, really) to determine from these URLs the Amazon account which is tied to these links and 'enforce' the C&D by canceling/refusing to pay that account's affilate link revenue.

The creator did an AMA on Reddit last year. Basically the site originally showed price history of other sites like Newegg but Amazon told the author they'd let him continue to get pricing info only if he removed the other sites and made it exclusively for Amazon, and he did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5xuniu/im_the_founder...

I can't tell, but I think that's actually shittier than just trying to shut down his extension.

Also, Amazon's retail teams rely on CCC because it's more accurate than their own tools.

You would think with internal data that internal tools would be better, but time and time again they're not.

Can anyone elaborate on this? I assume Amazon could trivially build an internal CCC, and I'm at a loss how their internal tools would be less accurate than a 3rd-party scraper...

Anyone who could elaborate is NDA'd.

In general, though, Amazon is always kind of starved for engineering resources. It sucks so much to work at in so many of its teams that it has a colossal retention problem and, one would expect, the corresponding level of technical debt.

Maybe if they made being an engineer there a winning proposition...

They could start with the vesting schedule for one.

Maybe have competitive salaries with FB & Google?

I genuinely do not understand why they don't do this. Bezos either has some sort of master plan relating to a high-turnover staff model or is delusional about the true culture underneath him. I don't know which.

Trump's using the same model fwiw.

So that's why I can no longer use Camelegg.

I understand why the author would cave to Amazon, but not why that would fail to cause competitor dedicated only to Newegg to pop up.

camelegg was shut down by newegg, not by amazon.

Wonder how that flies with regulatory authorities? Some places have rules around pricing behaviour and Amazon seems to be sailing close to the wind. http://www.comcom.govt.nz/fair-trading/fair-trading-act-fact...

It flies just fine if they're asleep at the wheel -- which they most definitely are.

If you are in Canada, you can use https://ca.camelcamelcamel.com/

Germany as well at https://de.camelcamelcamel.com/

There's also keepa.com which has an extension that puts the price history inline in Amazon. Extremely useful.

Thanks for the recommendation!

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