Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
camelcamelcamel.com
camelcamelcamel.com
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...
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.
So I think ccc would lose a lot of its usefulness.
> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.
[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies
The Advertising API is for advertisers running ads with Amazon Advertising. Apparently they don't allow certain competitors (shopping sites, comparison sites, ad networks) to use it: https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/ad-policy/api
The Product API is for affiliates to fetch product/price information in a reliable way instead of scraping the main site for it. I don't think they've ever prohibited price comparison sites. The last time I really looked into it was several years ago, and they weren't restricted at that point either.
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 trigger a set alert when the price is at or below the threshold. Is that correct or will it only alert when the exact price is found?
Thanks again for your very useful site!
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!
It changes my account language to German and causes Amazon to send me a "your account language was changed" email, so it kind of makes me avoid your direct links...
A lot of people, including me, are using amazon.de in English, as they have free shipping to quite a few European countries (and e.g. http://www.amazon.fi/ redirects there).
For small purchases I don't care that much (and .de has cheaper shipping to me), but for larger purchases I usually price-compare between .de, .co.uk, .fr, .it, .es, .com as the price difference may be significant (i.e. save me hundreds of euros), and all of those sites have had the cheapest price on occasion.
Amazon.lu (luxemberg) but no amazon.be (Belgium). Amazon.at (austria) but no amazon.ch (Switzerland). No Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, but they do have Lichtenstein, Poland, Denmark. No Slovakia (sk) but they do have Czech (cz).
Not having local amazon blows. You can buy prime but shipping isn't free or next day (best case 3 days usual around 5), a lot of the shows wont show etc. Also random thing will decide that they wont ship from one amazon, but will ships from some other. Also returns are expensive.
Thanks for the feedback.
Will it ever start working again?
Happy user since Fri 25 Mar 2011 (I just checked).
Whether toilet paper, a webcam, or whatever random thing that's been out of stock for a month -- set a CCC alert at some fairly high price and it'll e-mail you when it's back (below that price) -- even if the price you set is higher than it's ever been before.
I'm actually really surprised they haven't bothered to make that functionality explicit -- since it's not obvious that it will work -- and it's so valuable especially now.
(Confusingly, sometimes Amazon pages for out-of-stock items include a button to notify when something is back in stock, but most don't. They just say "we don't know if or when this will be in stock.")
I've become so reliant on CCC it really bugs me I can't use it (or an equivalent) on other sites -- e.g. Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Nike, J. Crew, whatever.
I think that’s a difference between a seller “owning” the listing for an FBA SKU such that Amazon can see in their intake logistics that more of that item is coming to their warehouse; vs. a non-FBA SKU where they don’t have that visibility; or vs. an item that has gone defunct where no seller is claiming responsibility for restocking the SKU any more.
I've actually been toying with this concept for a weekend project, essentially a quick 'n dirty node daemon process that checks prices periodically, for sites it knows how to. More often than not the data is just sitting there in JSON in the <head>, so you wouldn't necessarily have to scrape it either. (e.g. fossil)
Open source the project to let others send PRs for other sites...
Toss in a sendgrid key for emails and you're all set...
Prices are competitive information, at least competitive enough to warrant obfuscation and preventing scraping.
And, the more sources you have, the more likely things will constantly fail. Scraping is always fragile.
One of the first web-scraping projects I ever built was to find the lowest price for Clif bars. I ate about 365 per year, and in only 45 minutes of programming a cron job and push notifications, I easily saved $100 that year.
Services like Crawlera act as a proxy that also forces you to be nice. If anyone is getting into this, I would recommend they use a service like that to scrape at scale.
Let me just supply the URL and the price string... and let it automatically figure out the right <div> or class or id or surrounding text it can be extracted from. And if it ever breaks (can't be found, or returns something in a different numeric format) then just notify me to visit it and see what's up.
Command-line is one way to do it (can be the canonical version), but then a browser extension makes it even easier. You'll need a headless browser even from the command-line in any case, since the product info isn't always in the HTML at all.
We also take requests for any store listing URL and even if we don't support it right now such as Nike for example we will prioritize it and get it added to our queue to support tracking it.
The interesting thing about your point that Amazon and other merchants that have a "notify me" button is that they don't really work for users. However most of their methods are to process new inventory, their notification process is disconnected somehow and delayed for some reason. From the community I've been working to build as well, they all say the platform is much faster than the stores' versions.
The Staples price you show is $4 more than the price I paid.
What I've noticed is that for some of the items I'm looking for (like wireless chargers), the price of the items were slowly increased in the weeks leading up to Prime Day, so the deals are still more expensive than earlier in the summer. I think it's a typical business practice, but it's nice to see it verified in a chart.
Anyway, Amazon is a tough nut to crack. We were technically hostile actors, but at the time I don't think they allowed anyone to crawl them. So, props
Edit: to see it, you’ll likely first have to go to and enable Settings > Shortcuts > Allow untrusted shortcuts.
If they see value in CCC, why not natively add the feature themselves? If price history is made transparent, consumers also don’t have trust issues.
They think that most people aren't seeking, or missing, such a feature. That suspicious/especially frugal people who want to see a price history would actively seek such service, and find it anyway.
The way it currently works represents a kind of price discrimination, just like providing coupons that people have to find and cut out. Price sensitive people make the effort to track down pricing information and may be prepared to wait for a better deal. Price insensitive ones don’t and aren’t.
They don't want people to stop shopping because it's not a "good deal"
Amazon benefits here by sanctioning a price history tool with restrictions when others could take its place and include its higher margin goods (if you look, there are CCC competitors that aren't sanctioned in this way, but you have to look). Less measurably, the price history tracker provides better consumer experience, in line with Amazon's customer obsession. And finally, Amazon's warehouse space isn't unlimited, so informed consumers who know a particular price is extraordinary may help it free up space more quickly.
But I don't mind amazon smile (as money goes to charity as well)
I'd understand if the grand parent poster refused to use price alerts at all, maybe in order to avoid unnecessary purchases, but GP argued that a different service is better because it doesn't use affiliate links, which seems rather strange to me. After all you get an alert for a product you chose at a specific price you defined. The use of affiliate links doesn't change anything in this arrangement.
Here's a site whose presence in the Wayback Machine has been hardcoded out of existence: http://web.archive.org/web/*/camelcamelcamel.com
A cursory look at the privacy policies for it didn’t yield much either way for me.
Edit: D'oh. Had I looked a bit longer I would have seen the legal disclaimer that confirms this at the bottom of the about page:
> camelcamelcamel is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program
And they will cut you off, no questions asked, for violating that.
[0]: https://camelcamelcamel.com/blog/how-our-price-checking-syst... [1]: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/24/camelcamelca...
Can't find any info on that so may be mistaken though.
I then found keepa.com which has been good, if not better than CCC.
CCC is fantastic, but only does Amazon. BBB [:)] does prices from other sites as well (focused on books, but works for others too). Plus it offers book recommendations based on the one you are currently browsing (this was actually the main reason for us building it - discovering interesting new books. We added the price bit as it is a more frequently useful feature)
P.S. using camelcamelcamel and also Honey
There was also news that Amazon increased their prices during the pandemic? Do you data to suggest this is true?
"This page has been temporarily disabled due to abusive traffic from someone else."
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.
Were it not for CCC, I'd imagine I'd use Amazon even less than I do right now. Possibly not at all.
I’d expect more to the picture. CCC driven traffic is different than usual affiliate one, in way that it has strong revenue drag effect.
And even if it’s Amazon’s preference of sale over profit, it is matter of time when they decide they have enough scale to chop-off whatever contributes to quality of their profit.
I’d love someone with more pricing, marketing expertise to comment on this.
Amazon isn’t really ever going to achieve a substantially higher scale, there’s nowhere to go and the competition is catching up.
And amazon does already have these features. They often email me when something on my wish list is on sale. No price graph, but still it seems camels is just another lead generation/engagement tool that they don’t have to do themselves.
This would makes sense. ~95% of my Amazon purchases are 'sold by amazon', ~4% are 'fulfilled by amazon', as I strongly avoid 3rd party sellers. I am not sure how representative that is of larger customer base of Amazon. If its large enough, CCC traffic for Amazon is less desirable.
> And amazon does already have these features.
Not even close.
I wonder how much $ you can make on affiliate links.
consent.cmp.oath.com's server IP address could not be found.
Super helpful project, especially to see past surface-level ploys like some holiday "sales" where the discounted price is actually just the going price, and they put a fake crossed-out price near it.
https://sales.aviparshan.com/2020/10/how-to-cancel-your-amaz...