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Comment by maxyme | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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

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.

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