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Comment by L1quid | Hacker News Reader

Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long.

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...

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Is there a reason your "Buy" links for amazon.de include "&language=de_DE" in the URL?

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 some reason, websites just use the IP to make a language decision for the customer.

Seems poor of Amazon to do all that for following a GET request! Thought the most they'd do would be drop a cookie for that session.

Do you find that Amazon.de has better offers than others in Europe? I usually shop on my own country TLD and didnt't think before of checking if .de or any other has better offers and free shipping

Generally, no, it feels pretty random to me.

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 doesn't have a TLD for every country. It's super weird what they support...

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).

And some of the existing ones are not separate services either (amazon.pl is autotranslated amazon.de)

There is no Amazon for my country, and delivery is faster from Germany, than most other. But my German in not that good, and prefer English.

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.

I think Amazon is adding the language parameter. We do not force a language on outgoing links. Worth stripping on our end, though.

Thanks for the feedback.

Please consider adding other retailers. Often times, the better deal isn't on Amazon, and there tons of online retailers out there. Price checking historically on N platforms is a much more appealing value proposition.

On the other hand, they’re doing something well and hopefully doing well themselves because of it. Growth has an insidious way of taking useful things and ruining them sometimes.

It is against the amazon shopping api terms of service to offer price comparison. So they haven't probably for that reason.

But I do price comparisons in my head, so am I breaking their terms just by being human?

Not sure what you mean by shopping API, but here is all that their affiliate program policies[0] say about price comparisons with other sites:

> 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

I meant advertising API. Perhaps they have updated their terms for the advertising API, as it appears their affiliate program does allow price comparison now. I believe that was not the case previously.

They have poor naming. There is an Advertising API, and then there's a Product Advertising API which is often called the Product API.

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.

I am aware of at least one competitor that also shows the price of the cheapest listing on ebay

keepa

Keepa is the best because of not only that, but also the price tracker that shows up on the webpage of the item.

pricegrabber.com ?

Hey L1quid, great site! I have been using CCC since 2 months and it is amazing. Could you shed some light on how often do you check for price updates? I am asking because I was using it during Prime Day and it seemed like the prices were not immediately updated. Maybe this could be a new addition to the site!

Have a listen to https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/24/camelcamelca... or browse the transcript at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019... (27 page PDF)

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.

I suggest scraping primeDay page frequently and prioritise price update for products that appear on it.

Hey nice site. Do you plan to support amazon.in as well? I am currently using Keepa, they support .in as well as alerts on telegram

Thank you. We currently have no expansion plans.

I note that on almost all my price watches (UK site), the prices that CamelCamelCamel shows me are not accurate (most frequently listed as "Not in Stock" when following the link to the product on Amazon shows that they are in stock); this all stopped working, I think, in the early days of Covid? When you were asked to stop doing it to ease load or some such?

Will it ever start working again?

This looks pretty cool.

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!

At or below, yes. When it passes the threshold. It’s kind of the definition of “threshold”, if you think about it.

That makes sense, and that's what I figured -- as I mentioned.

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!

Thanks to your website, I got my Sage coffee machine for 250 euros less than what is sold in local stores and at least 100 euros less that the average price. Thank you for your work.

Wow! what model? 15 bar?

Sage Barista Express. Currently going for 550 pounds on amazon.uk, I got it 480. I have it for a year now and I can recommend it, with a warning that it has a unique filter/ion-exchanger requiring you to buy it from Sage.(Breville)

Idea try filter out those products that bump first their price and then drop it to get those gigantic percentage drops eg this https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0816S8DM7?active=pri...

Could you maybe shed some light why was Japan dropped from the supported country list?

Amazon's policies changed in both China and Japan. This cut us off from the product data in those countries.

Do you mind giving more details? My tiny site with Amazon Japan affiliate links has been running fine (although it literally has no traffic).

I see. Thank you. It's interesting because I use keepa.com for the very same reason and it works fine in Japan

Do you consider it a risk, that Amazon one day can decide to turn the tap off?

An awful lot of my decision making in the last ~13 years has included the question: what if the Camels don't exist tomorrow? Which isn't particularly unusual for a business, but it can make planning difficult.

+1 In meanwhile, this is great value add and win-win.

If Amazon cuts off the tap, some other major retailer would gladly step in to supply the data in very minimal time. Referral traffic is valuable.

No other major retailer has anything close to as many skus as amazon. And for any of the sites that do have a lot of products via 3rd party sellers, most of those products are much higher priced (they are probably being drop shipped from Amazon) and those prices don't change much.

So I think ccc would lose a lot of its usefulness.

They definitely do worry about that. They have had close calls before and had to negotiate with amazon to keep things going.

Thank you! CCC is great, and a guaranteed way to turn patience into savings.

Or right now, patience into just getting the damn thing. I just got a new power supply after a couple months of waiting by setting the Amazon price to under $500 and making sure the CCC emails trigger alerts on my phone.

Thank YOU for this wonderful site and service!

Happy user since Fri 25 Mar 2011 (I just checked).

I've been using it for several years, and really appreciate it. Thanks!

Please add support for amazon.nl

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