25 ms·

PriceZombie is shutting down

287 points by viach 11y ago

xbryanx 11y ago
I'd pay (once) for software that periodically ran on my computer, pinging a URL for a price, tracking it locally, and giving me an alert at a change threshold.
- enjo 11y ago
  https://keepa.com/ https://keepa.com/ basically does that, not locally and only for Amazon tho. It has saved my wife thousands of dollars on the various things she buys. Particularly the kind of seasonal stuff. We go to alot of music festivals and the fun costumes and fuzzy stuff she loves to wear fluctuates in price like crazy throughout the year. Keepa allows her to figure out when those fluctuations generally happen. They also remind her to set a price threshold based on historical data and then forget about it until it goes back down in price. Works great.
- chipperyman573 11y ago
  You could probably make that overnight. Just send a cURL to the page and look for the text of the span with the ID "priceblock_ourprice". Then log that to a comma delimited text file or something.
  - stevekemp 11y ago
    But the real problem would be updating your code every time the appropriate website(s) changed their markup. In a hosted service that's easy; if you're selling something people download you'll have to ensure timely updates.
    - chipperyman573 11y ago
      Which is why, unfortunately, this product can't realistically be a one-time fee.
nefitty 11y ago
Damn, this is exactly what I've been looking for for the last year. Any alternatives?
- rory096 11y ago
  CamelCamelCamel. Amazon only, though – and who knows if they'll be shut down too under this policy.
  - JoblessWonder 11y ago
    I think PriceZombie ran afoul because they compared Amazon's history to other competitor's websites like Walmart, Best Buy, etc. CamelCamelCamel just compares the current Amazon price to historical Amazon prices. One site makes it much easier to encourage you to buy on another site, one site makes it much easier to optimize your purchase while still remaining with Amazon.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    > This situation is further compounded by our competitors (who only index Amazon) being allowed to continue despite utilizing Amazon's data in the same manner as we did without facing similar bans. Looks like being Amazon only may be what is keeping them alive. I enjoy CamelCamelCamel a lot, it's fun to put in a low-ball price target and then months later get an email that it has been met.
- alanfalcon 11y ago
  SlickDeals developed something similar but my understanding is that Amazon "asked" them to kill it or severely cripple it. Amazon's got a big stick and isn't afraid to weild it.l here.
- m3Lith 11y ago
  Keepa (Amazon only).
- dynofuz 11y ago
  im working on https://percht.com https://percht.com (it's still early)
acconrad 11y ago
YC partner Aaron Harris had a similar problem with his first startup[1], and is a lesson for all startups: It's risky to rely on one customer for the majority of your revenue. 90% of PriceZombie's revenue was dependent on affiliate revenue, and thus Amazon. Similarly, virtually all of TutorSpree's revenue was dependent on SEO, and thus on Google, and when Google changed their algorithm, they saw a similar fate. [1] http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-dependency-and-the-end-of-tutorspree http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-de...
- darkclarity 11y ago
  A similar thing happened to me with Google Images. They were unintentionally a major source of my traffic. Some years ago Google changed their Images service so that it continued to take images from other websites but was very unlikely to send people to the source. It surprised me how little fightback there was to this change. So, anyway, never rely on platforms like that, always assume it's a temporary arrangement (especially if the platform is run by a major player).
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  This is part of the risk of startups/business. This is like the opposite of survivorship bias... Think about all the successful companies out there that DO depend on third parties: - Buffer (Twitter has a bad day? Cut their API access off!) - Candy Crush (Apple hates them? Remove their apps!) - RetailMeNot (Google thinks they're spam! Delist them!) - DuckDuckGo (Bing hates them? Cut off their API access) - Heroku (Amazon has a bad day? Cut off their AWS Access) - MailPlane (Google doesn't want Gmail apps?! Cut them off!)
  - shostack 11y ago
    Just because these companies are doing well today says nothing of the potential impact this (still very present) risk holds for them.
codegeek 11y ago
Feel bad for them really. But this is a classic example of the risk you undertake running a business where you core depends on a third party. It is astonishing that they lost 90% of their business just due to amazon closing their affiliate account.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  I saw a girls startup plan that involved exclusively using Facebook. I was like, "You really need to support Flickr, Twitter. You shouldn't depend on one source for your customers to pull photos." She said they were just going Facebook because it was the quickest route to get a deliverable product. She obviously wasn't an engineer and I'm sure any software dev will tell you if you support at least two services, you'll write code in such a way that's expandable to many (more modular, classes for each service type). Even if that 2nd service may not have any customer base, it's worth the implementation cost just to have. This doesn't really relate to this story as Price Zombie did utilize many different sites, but it does show just how big the giants are (like Facebook/Amazon) that even if you try to support lots of different sources, one of them can make or break you.
great_kraken 11y ago
Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.
- nathancahill 11y ago
  I've found that very helpful. Otherwise, I feel like I'm gambling when I buy something on Amazon. I could be getting the lowest price, or the highest. Amazon's price games are the worst (I know all stores do that to some extent, but Amazon's price swings are much bigger.. +-75% anecdotally)
  - great_kraken 11y ago
    Yeah, I guess I'd rather search myself if I'm actually considering buying a product. And most of the time, if I'm participating somewhere, I'm not actually looking for purchase advice myself, just reading, helping out, or discussing.
    - nathancahill 11y ago
      I guess I'm pretty often looking for purchase advice in a lot of the subreddits I frequent. Helpful to get advice from people with domain knowledge.
    - dipnuggetron 11y ago
      I'm with you, that is simply affiliate spam, no matter how much you mustache bacon it up cutesifying it for Reddit with a faux usefulness. Surprised they weren't banned from more subreddits.
- gtk40 11y ago
  Can't you just block the bot if it bugged you? There are several bots I block, but that's not one of them.
- cryowaffle 11y ago
elbigbad 11y ago
This sucks, but unfortunately is something that is not unlikely to happen when one's whole service is hosted or relies on a third party API for its data. I recall something similar happening with a service that relied on the Google Maps API to draw coordinates or something. And Google pulled API access because the service was too similar to what Google Maps did with trip directions, or something. Unfortunately this is a reality of basing, or largely basing, a whole service off of a third party.
- Etheryte 11y ago
  The point here is not that they're relying on a third party, but the fact that Amazon banned them from the api while their competitors/alternatives can still use it without constraint.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    Isn't that a bit like complaining to the police officer who pulled you over that other people were speeding, too?
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      The problem is that unequally applies rules are often intermingled with biases. While a single instance of 'what about that other guy' isn't a worthwhile plea, if you can show a trend as to who gets pulled based on something other than speeding, you have a problem. In business, it is less of an issue because business doesn't need to be fair to the same standard of law. There are still certain laws and protect groups and such, but the bar is still much lower than in law. The complaint of unfairness can be valid, but also pointless.
    - mindslight 11y ago
      Besides likely being less effective than saving such arguments for the magistrate, what exactly is wrong with that? It's a standard avenue of contesting a speeding ticket.
NicoJuicy 11y ago
Can you create this a self hosted application? Then Amazon can't really track this ( i suppose). They should suddenly start tracking thousands of affliates and you could earn some money from it :) ( i suppose) Eg. Something like https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/ , i believe they earn plenty of money also :p
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Chrome extension for scraping and affiliate link placement?
  - dan-silver 11y ago
    If Amazon found out they can still shut down that affiliate link.
  - Kerrick 11y ago
    They wrote that into the Terms of Service a couple of years ago. I know because I created one before the rule change and had to remove that part.
- homero 11y ago
  That's not the problem, the problem is they needed commissions
ap22213 11y ago
It seems kind of extreme to shut down based on that. Wouldn't the technology be useful for other uses? I'd imagine that some would pay for that kind of historical data.
- Jemmeh 11y ago
  The thing is there are other websites giving that historical data away for free. Their affiliate accounts haven't been shut down (yet?). So PriceZombie just can't compete. Makes me kind of wonder if they were just the "top" website doing this, and so they suffered from too much success.
  - JBReefer 11y ago
    It's because they compared with other services, and Amazon has been raising prices across the board lately, which they don't really want people to figure out.
T3RMINATED 11y ago
it sucked anyways they always had high prices
maindrive 11y ago
This is what happens when you rely totally on third party and then when you grow you ,company will be closed either by a buyout or legal termination.
mattlutze 11y ago
The issue here wasn't that they were just using Amazon's API and then lost access. The Amazon TOS says don't store and display our old prices and, per the post, that's what PriceZombie was doing. The lesson is that if you're doing something in violation of a partner's TOS and start to negatively effect their business, the partner is well within their rights to cut off access. Whether other businesses have or haven't been slapped down is only a secondary question.
- iolothebard 11y ago
  Exactly, you want to run something like this you have to scrape like LexisNexis, etc.
  - gberger 11y ago
    It doesn't matter how they scrape. They could continue scraping prices if they wanted to. The problem is they lost access to the Affiliates API -- which is how they make money.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      They couldn't continue scraping without Amazon's permission. The CFAA makes that illegal.
      - iolothebard 11y ago
        Not sure how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Protected_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#P...
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        Most Terms of Use contain language that states that automated access is unauthorized, and most companies allege you've agreed to their Terms of Use by accessing any page other than their front page (or accessing the front page more than once). Furthermore, even if this is lacking, once a company provides notice that you are no longer authorized to access their computers, it doesn't matter what the Terms of Use may say or whether the ToU is considered a binding contract; you've received notice that your access is unauthorized. The CFAA generally applies to any computer access, as the Commerce Clause has been interpreted as applying to completely intra-state transactions (ignoring the fact that most computer access crosses state lines, which would make it a federal issue anyway), and thus, effectively all computers attached to the internet are "protected computers". Even if you're able to prevail in the argument that the CFAA is not applicable, there are similarly-worded state statutes, and as mentioned, other issues may federal matters, like alleged copyright and trademark infringement (which is usually alleged in such cases). The CFAA is somewhat grey so if you have a few hundred k or more to flush on your lawyers, go ahead, it's possible that you may win. For most people, it's not relevant, because they can't afford to go head-to-head against a major global corporate entity like Amazon. One of the main goals of such a company is to make the lawsuit as costly as possible for the opposing party, since they have infinity money and they know that their opponent likely doesn't. If you're interested, there have been a handful of cases already litigated on the CFAA. The scrapers usually get smoked hard. Look up Ticketmaster v. RMG Technologies, Craigslist v. 3Taps, Register.com v. Verio, and Facebook v. Power Ventures to get started.
patio11 11y ago
Our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening I was once in a room with Dave McClure and a ~50ish companies he had funded. He announced that he was taking a tour of partnership teams at two members of AppAmaGooBookSoft and asked for who wanted to come with. A handful of hands were raised. Dave McClure got frothing mad, and not his normal frothing character mad, but I think actually angry. "LISTEN UP. 80% of you are building on these platforms. If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS. You will %(#)%#0 fail. If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me." I don't think I'd phrase it like that, but the core message is exactly correct. The standard platform deal is, indeed, in the event of an issue you can write to an inbox that no one reads. You do not want that deal. You should, as early as practical, identify an actual human inside the mothership and convince them to like you. You should then lateral from that actual human to other actual humans so that you do not lose your beachhead if your actual human is re-assigned. If you do not do this, when you inevitably have a problem, you will be reduced to taking it to the HN front page and hoping an actual human takes pity on you. Pity is a much less likely outcome than convincing an actual human than you are scads better than their median semi-anonymous participant in the partnership program, which is pretty easy, because their median participant is terrible and all processes are designed to treat them as such. I am aware that this some people will perceive this as unfair because getting better-than-publicly-available access to one's business partners seems like you're at a position of advantage vis-a-vis the people who can only send mails to /dev/null. Is this an advantage? Yes. If you believe this is an unfair advantage, I would strongly counsel you to negotiate honestly and in good faith with your counterparties at your largest business partner and source of existential risk, and not worry so much about other putative businesses which are not sophisticated enough to negotiate honestly and in good with faith their core suppliers.
- gizmodo59 11y ago
  "identify an actual human inside the mothership" This is so valuable. I was intrigued by who wrote this and no wonder it is Patrick. (I highly recommend this article by him: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...). My two cents: Talk to human. Develop social skills they matter more than what you think.
PaulHoule 11y ago
name.toLower().contains("zombie") -> FAIL you FAIL
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Saying fail is a lowercase fail. Saying fail with code is an uppercase FAIL.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    FAIL!
    - dang 11y ago
      Please don't do this here.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  What is it with the downvotes? Zombie is the moe of American culture; you just take something good put Zombie on it, and then idiots will lap it up at the movie theatre.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    JustSomeNobody is right. fail-as-a-noun is in the same dumb bucket as overuse of zombies. Also outside of extreme cases, a silly product name should not be a big problem.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Sure, but where was all this sober reasonable wisdom earlier this week when dozens of comments were aghast at "Boom"? Although, if ever there were a company closure about which one couldn't be too sure...
mwexler 11y ago
All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything. So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from merchants. Same for Travel sites/aggregators, and for review sites: You either get folks to pay for them (of which Angie's List was the only kind of success) or you get vendors to pay you (Yelp, any affiliate aggregator (Creditcards.com, etc.), price engines). I guess I wonder: I love CamelCamelCamel, I loved PriceZombie, I loved PriceRunner and Jango and all the rest... but they keep going away. Google killed google shopping comparisons, as did the other portals. We can probably all think of ones we used that are all gone now. What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? And given that many merchants are creating terms of service to block displaying of their prices (we see this also in the travel industry), will one of the earliest dreams of the internet, that of a flat marketplace where I can evaluate all players and their pricing and pick the best store for me, still fail to come to life? It feels like online shopping has become a big mall, where I have to go to as many sites as I can find til I get tired and just buy the thing at the most recent site (or just trust that Amazon is the cheapest). I hope we can avoid this fate. (Update: fixed typos)
- meritt 11y ago
  CamelCamelCamel has not went anywhere. But they also don't serve affiliate links as far as I can tell, so their revenue model (if they have one) is not dependent on an affiliate relationship.
  - designtofly 11y ago
    CCC does serve affiliate links. If you go to any product page on CCC and click the "Buy" button, you'll end up at Amazon and the URL will have the "tag=camelproducts-20" for their affiliate code in the URL. I'm sure every Amazon-bound link on their website or browser plug-in will do the same.
manmal 11y ago
Here in Austria, Amazon pays the major price comparison website to be listed: www.geizhals.at And I hear it's not cheap for them.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Well, being listed on a price comparison website is basically advertising, and can funnel a lot of traffic to Amazon if they are often the cheaper or better choice. This service just used referrals to make a bit of money instead, probably because there's a lot more price comparison website competition in the US and Amazon doesn't want to fund them all to get listed. They get away with it too, because a price comparison website is not feasible without having amazon as one of the shops.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  It works in Austria because of how many people use Geizhals: basically everybody in certain categories who is a regular shopper. They have a huge reach.
- lazyjones 11y ago
  That's not strictly true. Amazon pays affiliate fees, not for being listed. I can't disclose details, but Amazon apparently has no issues with big CSEs (Idealo.de, billiger.de) but obviously they don't like sites that focus on deal "sniping" (like PriceZombie and "deal" sites) as much, since that cuts into their margins (people buy mostly temporarily low-margin offers through such sites and affiliate fees are too expensive there).
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
> Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with other stores, please contact us at support@pricezombie.com Yeah, that's really going to help your situation. 1) You built your product on top of someone else's service. That's always a rocky road. It is common to read about other companies in your shoes. 2) In the time you were operating you couldn't make a single contact at Amazon in case stuff happens?
- jonknee 11y ago
  And Amazon isn't scared of the situation, they just don't want to subsidize it. Not really surprising.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  Definitely not defending them, but sometime's initiating contact can be a tricky thing. Because they may not have paid attention to you, and now you're basically told them "Hi, I exist!". Then later in a meeting, someone in Amazon says "Oh hey.. this site exists. I didn't know that... isn't that a violation of our TOS..??"
  - uremog 11y ago
    Or even: that's not a violation ... well then make it one!
- InsideTrack 11y ago
  1. PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon. PriceZombie indexes products and prices in over 100 online retailers. The developers always had the option of using the PZ website as a front end to gather personal shopping habits and other data that is valuable to advertising and marketing companies - which is what many (most?) price trackers do as their primary source of revenue. PZ opted to get their funding from retailers instead. People purchased mostly from Amazon, therefor when Amazon pulled their affiliate program funding dried up and PZ had a choice - go to the dark side, close up, or sell. 2. They had many contacts, some of them quite high. PZ is a very ethical and methodical company. They dotted their i's and crossed their t's. They had an open dialog with Amazon where they were repeatedly told, in writing and on the phone, that they were in full compliance and there was no problem. The problem with Amazon is inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules. The developers are in discussions now with companies that want to purchase the technology - including my own, though I don't think we can afford them. This is no garage set up by comp sci students. The developers have impressive credentials and they have created a very impressive system that has wide application to other uses.
specialp 11y ago
It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days. Early on in my computer shopping days I'd hit pricewatch and buy from random vendors based on price. Eventually this company called Newegg often had the near the lowest price always and had great service. I soon went to shopping at Newegg consistently without bothering to go to pricewatch. Newegg could have raised prices slightly but I did not want to waste time with untrusted vendors. The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  I recently did a fresh computer build for the first time since 2005. I was use to using PriceWatch for parts and buying from smaller stores. I've actually been out of the country for four years, and upon my return, I see most of the small shops are gone. The lowest prices seem to always be Newegg, Amazon, SuperBizz and Microcenter. They've pretty much squished out a lot of the market, and it seems like Newegg allows other vendors to sell through it just like Amazon. It's kinda sad really. The last city I lived in still had computer stores. The one I moved to doesn't...at all. There are some recycled PC stores, but the only new parts store is a Frys way out of the city. Fuck Frys too.
- gdulli 11y ago
  I never got Prime because the yearly cost of it (even before the price went up) did not amortize to an acceptable shipping cost. I take the slower free shipping because I'm not impatient or buying on impulse. So I've never been locked into Amazon and always been free to shop around. And I can absolutely confirm that Amazon is no longer the "default" winner on price. Sometimes they are, but often not. I don't even have to spend a lot of time shopping around to find this. The same deals are everywhere now.
tylercubell 11y ago
For PriceZombie and many other businesses, depending on one major revenue source to survive can be a death sentence and at the very least pose an existential risk. Let this be a hard lesson in diversification.
hvo 11y ago
Padmapper was forced to shut down too by Craigslist.When are we going to learn that this type of business model is unsustainable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455
- gdulli 11y ago
  Yeah if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything. You might leech some money off someone else's marketplace for a while but don't expect it to last.
  - mthoms 11y ago
    >if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything If you're regurgitating in a manner that is beneficial for both parties and the customer then I'd say you've created something extremely valuable. Just ask Google.
- stale2002 11y ago
  Padmapper ended up fine though.... They just got acquired for millions.
jijji 11y ago
If your objective is to write a crawler that parses pricing information from a third party web site, then write the crawler. Relying on the third party to provide a consistent API that can be remotely communicated with is setting yourself up for failure. These companies can quickly ban you from their platform when using their API. At least by writing the crawler yourself, you're making it much more difficult for them to do this. Another lesson is that building a business model around the availability of a third party is also a recipe for failure.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  I don't think that would have mattered here. They were generating revenue from the Affiliate API. Even if they made a scraper and used that for price data instead, they're still violating the TOS for the Affiliate program. It wouldn't matter how they go the data.
  - johnward 11y ago
    I don't remember, nor can I find, any reference to not using historical pricing data with amazon associates: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement/ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement... The specific section on pricing in the api doc (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/agreement.html/ref=amb_link_353005802_15?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=assoc-center-1&pf_rd_r=&pf_rd_t=501&pf_rd_p=&pf_rd_i=assoc_operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...) seems to indicate historical pricing is allowed if you display the date with it: "(o) You will include a date/time stamp adjacent to your display of pricing or availability information on your application if you obtain Product Advertising Content from a Data Feed, or if you call the Product Advertising API or refresh the Product Advertising Content displayed on your application less frequently than hourly. However, during the same day on which you requested and refreshed the pricing and availability information displayed on your application, you may omit the date portion of the stamp. Examples of acceptable messaging include: Amazon.com Price: $32.77 (as of 01/07/2008 14:11 PST - Details) Amazon.com Price: $32.77 (as of 14:11 PST - More info) Additionally, you must either include the following disclaimer adjacent to the pricing or availability information or provide it via a hyperlink, popup box, scripted popup, or other similar method: "Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product." In the above examples, "Details" and "More info" would provide a method for the end user to read the disclaimer." Update: I'm thinking it's probably a violation of this: "(n) You will not store or cache Product Advertising Content consisting of an image, but you may store a link to Product Advertising Content consisting of an image for up to 24 hours. You may store other Product Advertising Content that does not consist of images for caching purposes for up to 24 hours, but if you do so you must immediately thereafter refresh and re-display the Product Advertising Content by making a call to the Product Advertising API or retrieving a new Data Feed and refreshing the Product Advertising Content on your application immediately thereafter."
ryao 11y ago
I am going to miss their price protection tracker that emailed when the price dropped within a certain period of time following a purchase. That let me get the difference refunded by my credit card company.
heyplanet 11y ago
UPDATE: Hey, lot's of downvotes for this post. Would be great if you guys could explain why you downvote. Sorry, but not much sympathy from me. 1) You knowingly violated the terms of service. Therefore you are denied service now. Nothing to complain about. Honestly, if the API of my website would be intentionally abused in a way that I explicitly exclude in my TOS, I would be seriously pissed. I would probably think about suing you. Not only denying you further service. 2) You whine, bitch and complain because others did not get the same treatment as you. There are also many murders and robbers who are not in prison. If it would not be allowed to put one criminal into prison unless we put them all into prison, there would be no law and order at all. 3) You encourage the problem. By shutting down just because Amazon kicked you out. Why not address the problem that 90% of your revenue came from one single retailer? Why not talk to the other retailers and the users and see if there is a way to work it out? Do the difficult thing: CREATE! Don't beg! Sorry, if this sounds harsh. I welcome and applaude every tech entrepreneur. But please stand up and fight for the right thing. For a better world. Not just for a bit of profit by bending the rules.
- plugnburn 11y ago
  Upvoted just to keep the thread and go against "elitist" hivemind.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    How about the "read the article" hivemind? There's a bit of a difference between "knowingly violated the terms of service" and "told we were in 100% compliance with the rules". Also, if you want a dumb crime analogy, imagine a situation where robbers get locked up... but only if they voted for a particular party. Uneven enforcement based on whim is a bad thing. Especially when someone is trying extremely hard to follow the rules.
- stale2002 11y ago
  They were TOLD that they were 100% in compliance with the rules and that there was no problem. And then one day things changed for no reason.
johnward 11y ago
The lesson here isn't about breaking TOS. The lesson is that if you build a business around a 3rd party API that party can crush you at any moment without reason.
rand1298 11y ago
Amazon associates is corrupt and not worth your time or its existence. They will wait until day 29 of 30 then shut down your account (after they collect revenue) and find any reason to shut your account down. They have no obligation to state a reason in their email to you. It's a scheme at its finest, unless you are willing to settle for working 8 hours a day for 20 dollars a day capped.
johnward 11y ago
The immature part of me would have just done a massive url redirect to a competitor. I would say change the links on the page but that would probably get you in even more legal trouble.
DanBlake 11y ago
Im guessing the reason you were canned was less to do with historical pricing and entirely about the fact you let them compare with other sites. I am fairly certain amazon hates that with a passion and is in fact why you dont see that feature on CCC. Also, Its my understanding that all of these price comparison sites get a severely discounted affiliate rate from amazon- Something like 1%
frozenport 11y ago
Why do they need an account? Can't they just crawl Amazon and get price info? Or is their business only viable if they can collect a percentage of your purchase?
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Exactly. Affiliate is their only profit. Sure they can crawl and link, but they would get 0 profit from that.
viach 11y ago
Why didn't they come to an agreement with one of the Amazon's competitors? It sounds like a logical next step which needs to be taken to survive.
girkyturkey 11y ago
This is such a shame... I really enjoyed PriceZombie to display old prices, even though they shouldn't have been doing this. I wonder why Amazon changed their mind after 3 years?
pink_dinner 11y ago
"However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening. " This is pretty standard for Amazon marketplace seller services. They take a 16%+ cut of all of your sales and have absolutely nobody to help you when your account is banned or disabled by one of their auto bots. This happened to a client of mine a few years back. Near 100% feedback, complying with every rule, and one day they get the ban hammer (for a claim that was later withdrawn by the original person that filed it). Amazon withheld $50,000 for over 3 months while they were 'investigating'. After 3 emails where Amazon responded with canned responses, they said the matter was 'closed' and all future emails would not be answered. Do NOT do business with Amazon. You will end up sorry and probably without a business. As as an associate or marketplace seller, they own all of your clients and you are responsibly for anything bad that happens. When you get kicked, they have all of your data, your clients, and your money for 90 days. On top of this, they compete with their own marketplace sellers (unlike Ebay) and use all of your sales information to undercut you. I witnessed it many times with the above client. This should be against the law. I think the only reason they haven't been sued out of existence is because their so big.
shostack 11y ago
As others here have noted, the affiliate game is a risky one. You are in essence a sales rep for whichever merchant(s) you work with. A merchant has ZERO legal obligation to continue working with you, and can often discriminate against you as they see fit, terms be damned. If you don't own the relationship with your primary source of revenue, your business is built on a rocky foundation, and if the weather is fickle enough, you can be washed away overnight. Having been an affiliate, managed an affiliate program, and worked with an OPM to manage the program, I can say that stuff like this happens all the time in the industry, and that's why the #1 rule for affiliates is "diversify diversify diversify."
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I find such actions puzzling, in a world where (charge per click) CPC advertising no longer works due to click fraud, (charge per action) CPA advertising offers a sane alternative. Only pay for the actions of customers, if someone buys, you pay, if they don't, you owe nothing. And yet CPA is treated like a really off color way to feed a few pennies to bloggers. In this case Amazon doesn't like past prices being stored and shown. Ok, I get it that doing so exposes sellers who price high during "rush" seasons and low during "off" seasons, or the difference in price quoted to a Dallas IP address versus one from San Francisco, but shouldn't those sorts of shenanigans be exposed?
elorant 11y ago
Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?
- lazyjones 11y ago
  Crawling Amazon is no longer feasible if you want up-to-date prices. There's 10s of millions of pages to crawl, it takes too long. I believe they also added captchas against excessive crawling (perhaps via Tor only).
- sangnoir 11y ago
  It wouldn't make a difference: it is their affiliate account was that was closed - which is how they earned money. Affiliate account = getting paid "kickbacks" by Amazon for customer referalls from PZ's site that result in purchases.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  It wouldn't matter. If Amazon didn't want them accessing their servers, they could file suit under the CFAA. They could also allege copyright infringement, since judges have ruled that the temporary copy of a page stored in RAM from which factual non-copyrightable data is extracted (as would be the case on an Amazon product page) constitutes an infringing copy, and trademark infringement and dilution. The existing body of law is very hostile to scrapers. Server access is treated like access to land. The "owner" can kick you off whenever they want.
unclebucknasty 11y ago
They note that Amazon is "afraid of services that compare their prices with other stores". It's more likely Amazon just doesn't see the value. Why would they want to pay a company to drive traffic to Amazon, only when Amazon's prices are lower? Otherwise, they actively drive traffic to their competitors? Amazon is not in dire need of traffic, and with their algorithmic pricing, information is an advantage. Perhaps there is a business case that can be made. But, OTOH, it doesn't strike me as irrational that Amazon would rather not.
DiabloD3 11y ago
Dear PriceZombie: I will pay you $x a year to keep your service functional. Go figure out what x is, given the number of active users you have , and what it costs to keep the service open. Also, email me at pmcfarland@exelion.net. I am a service provider, I might be able to help you cut down your cost of operating.
samp615 11y ago
This blog is "loser talk".
zaroth 11y ago
Probably too late to comment (what a shame discussion is so time limited) but what interests me about this story is that they call out hosting costs as the reason to shut down. I would love to see numbers from this operation, like we saw after Everpix. I would love to understand the scale, if it really would cost so much to host it? So perhaps the actual take away is they didn't really violate the ToS as it is written, but they got kicked out and should have known it would happen. They may have been targeted because they show competitors pricing. Either way, it's sad to lose the service, but hard to chase those customers, because the customer won't pay. They are trying to sell the IP and maybe the company, and apparently there's some sturdy tech with broad applications! What's so tricky is the dispute isn't about API access for the latest pricing, but rather their affiliate revenue. That can be canceled for any reason at any time, so that they still get the API and could find other revenue streams is a key point. They are not "entitled" to Amazon affiliate revenue, so then the question is -- where's the story?
jazoom 11y ago
This is sad. I really feel for them. I'm making a similar website for another country and am planning to bring it to the US later this year. It will largely fill the gap of Price Zombie. Big shoes to fill, though.

287 points by viach 11y ago

I'd pay (once) for software that periodically ran on my computer, pinging a URL for a price, tracking it locally, and giving me an alert at a change threshold.

enjo 11y ago
https://keepa.com/ https://keepa.com/ basically does that, not locally and only for Amazon tho. It has saved my wife thousands of dollars on the various things she buys. Particularly the kind of seasonal stuff. We go to alot of music festivals and the fun costumes and fuzzy stuff she loves to wear fluctuates in price like crazy throughout the year. Keepa allows her to figure out when those fluctuations generally happen. They also remind her to set a price threshold based on historical data and then forget about it until it goes back down in price. Works great.
chipperyman573 11y ago
You could probably make that overnight. Just send a cURL to the page and look for the text of the span with the ID "priceblock_ourprice". Then log that to a comma delimited text file or something.
- stevekemp 11y ago
  But the real problem would be updating your code every time the appropriate website(s) changed their markup. In a hosted service that's easy; if you're selling something people download you'll have to ensure timely updates.
  - chipperyman573 11y ago
    Which is why, unfortunately, this product can't realistically be a one-time fee.

nefitty 11y ago

Damn, this is exactly what I've been looking for for the last year. Any alternatives?

rory096 11y ago
CamelCamelCamel. Amazon only, though – and who knows if they'll be shut down too under this policy.
- JoblessWonder 11y ago
  I think PriceZombie ran afoul because they compared Amazon's history to other competitor's websites like Walmart, Best Buy, etc. CamelCamelCamel just compares the current Amazon price to historical Amazon prices. One site makes it much easier to encourage you to buy on another site, one site makes it much easier to optimize your purchase while still remaining with Amazon.
- jonknee 11y ago
  > This situation is further compounded by our competitors (who only index Amazon) being allowed to continue despite utilizing Amazon's data in the same manner as we did without facing similar bans. Looks like being Amazon only may be what is keeping them alive. I enjoy CamelCamelCamel a lot, it's fun to put in a low-ball price target and then months later get an email that it has been met.
alanfalcon 11y ago
SlickDeals developed something similar but my understanding is that Amazon "asked" them to kill it or severely cripple it. Amazon's got a big stick and isn't afraid to weild it.l here.
m3Lith 11y ago
Keepa (Amazon only).
dynofuz 11y ago
im working on https://percht.com https://percht.com (it's still early)

acconrad 11y ago

YC partner Aaron Harris had a similar problem with his first startup[1], and is a lesson for all startups: It's risky to rely on one customer for the majority of your revenue. 90% of PriceZombie's revenue was dependent on affiliate revenue, and thus Amazon. Similarly, virtually all of TutorSpree's revenue was dependent on SEO, and thus on Google, and when Google changed their algorithm, they saw a similar fate. [1] http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-dependency-and-the-end-of-tutorspree http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-de...

darkclarity 11y ago
A similar thing happened to me with Google Images. They were unintentionally a major source of my traffic. Some years ago Google changed their Images service so that it continued to take images from other websites but was very unlikely to send people to the source. It surprised me how little fightback there was to this change. So, anyway, never rely on platforms like that, always assume it's a temporary arrangement (especially if the platform is run by a major player).
AznHisoka 11y ago
This is part of the risk of startups/business. This is like the opposite of survivorship bias... Think about all the successful companies out there that DO depend on third parties: - Buffer (Twitter has a bad day? Cut their API access off!) - Candy Crush (Apple hates them? Remove their apps!) - RetailMeNot (Google thinks they're spam! Delist them!) - DuckDuckGo (Bing hates them? Cut off their API access) - Heroku (Amazon has a bad day? Cut off their AWS Access) - MailPlane (Google doesn't want Gmail apps?! Cut them off!)
- shostack 11y ago
  Just because these companies are doing well today says nothing of the potential impact this (still very present) risk holds for them.

codegeek 11y ago

Feel bad for them really. But this is a classic example of the risk you undertake running a business where you core depends on a third party. It is astonishing that they lost 90% of their business just due to amazon closing their affiliate account.

djsumdog 11y ago
I saw a girls startup plan that involved exclusively using Facebook. I was like, "You really need to support Flickr, Twitter. You shouldn't depend on one source for your customers to pull photos." She said they were just going Facebook because it was the quickest route to get a deliverable product. She obviously wasn't an engineer and I'm sure any software dev will tell you if you support at least two services, you'll write code in such a way that's expandable to many (more modular, classes for each service type). Even if that 2nd service may not have any customer base, it's worth the implementation cost just to have. This doesn't really relate to this story as Price Zombie did utilize many different sites, but it does show just how big the giants are (like Facebook/Amazon) that even if you try to support lots of different sources, one of them can make or break you.

great_kraken 11y ago

Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.

nathancahill 11y ago
I've found that very helpful. Otherwise, I feel like I'm gambling when I buy something on Amazon. I could be getting the lowest price, or the highest. Amazon's price games are the worst (I know all stores do that to some extent, but Amazon's price swings are much bigger.. +-75% anecdotally)
- great_kraken 11y ago
  Yeah, I guess I'd rather search myself if I'm actually considering buying a product. And most of the time, if I'm participating somewhere, I'm not actually looking for purchase advice myself, just reading, helping out, or discussing.
  - nathancahill 11y ago
    I guess I'm pretty often looking for purchase advice in a lot of the subreddits I frequent. Helpful to get advice from people with domain knowledge.
  - dipnuggetron 11y ago
    I'm with you, that is simply affiliate spam, no matter how much you mustache bacon it up cutesifying it for Reddit with a faux usefulness. Surprised they weren't banned from more subreddits.
gtk40 11y ago
Can't you just block the bot if it bugged you? There are several bots I block, but that's not one of them.
cryowaffle 11y ago

elbigbad 11y ago

This sucks, but unfortunately is something that is not unlikely to happen when one's whole service is hosted or relies on a third party API for its data. I recall something similar happening with a service that relied on the Google Maps API to draw coordinates or something. And Google pulled API access because the service was too similar to what Google Maps did with trip directions, or something. Unfortunately this is a reality of basing, or largely basing, a whole service off of a third party.

Etheryte 11y ago
The point here is not that they're relying on a third party, but the fact that Amazon banned them from the api while their competitors/alternatives can still use it without constraint.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Isn't that a bit like complaining to the police officer who pulled you over that other people were speeding, too?
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    The problem is that unequally applies rules are often intermingled with biases. While a single instance of 'what about that other guy' isn't a worthwhile plea, if you can show a trend as to who gets pulled based on something other than speeding, you have a problem. In business, it is less of an issue because business doesn't need to be fair to the same standard of law. There are still certain laws and protect groups and such, but the bar is still much lower than in law. The complaint of unfairness can be valid, but also pointless.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    Besides likely being less effective than saving such arguments for the magistrate, what exactly is wrong with that? It's a standard avenue of contesting a speeding ticket.

NicoJuicy 11y ago

Can you create this a self hosted application? Then Amazon can't really track this ( i suppose). They should suddenly start tracking thousands of affliates and you could earn some money from it :) ( i suppose) Eg. Something like https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/ , i believe they earn plenty of money also :p

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Chrome extension for scraping and affiliate link placement?
- dan-silver 11y ago
  If Amazon found out they can still shut down that affiliate link.
- Kerrick 11y ago
  They wrote that into the Terms of Service a couple of years ago. I know because I created one before the rule change and had to remove that part.
homero 11y ago
That's not the problem, the problem is they needed commissions

ap22213 11y ago

It seems kind of extreme to shut down based on that. Wouldn't the technology be useful for other uses? I'd imagine that some would pay for that kind of historical data.

Jemmeh 11y ago
The thing is there are other websites giving that historical data away for free. Their affiliate accounts haven't been shut down (yet?). So PriceZombie just can't compete. Makes me kind of wonder if they were just the "top" website doing this, and so they suffered from too much success.
- JBReefer 11y ago
  It's because they compared with other services, and Amazon has been raising prices across the board lately, which they don't really want people to figure out.

T3RMINATED 11y ago

it sucked anyways they always had high prices

maindrive 11y ago

This is what happens when you rely totally on third party and then when you grow you ,company will be closed either by a buyout or legal termination.

mattlutze 11y ago

The issue here wasn't that they were just using Amazon's API and then lost access. The Amazon TOS says don't store and display our old prices and, per the post, that's what PriceZombie was doing. The lesson is that if you're doing something in violation of a partner's TOS and start to negatively effect their business, the partner is well within their rights to cut off access. Whether other businesses have or haven't been slapped down is only a secondary question.

iolothebard 11y ago
Exactly, you want to run something like this you have to scrape like LexisNexis, etc.
- gberger 11y ago
  It doesn't matter how they scrape. They could continue scraping prices if they wanted to. The problem is they lost access to the Affiliates API -- which is how they make money.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    They couldn't continue scraping without Amazon's permission. The CFAA makes that illegal.
    - iolothebard 11y ago
      Not sure how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Protected_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#P...
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        Most Terms of Use contain language that states that automated access is unauthorized, and most companies allege you've agreed to their Terms of Use by accessing any page other than their front page (or accessing the front page more than once). Furthermore, even if this is lacking, once a company provides notice that you are no longer authorized to access their computers, it doesn't matter what the Terms of Use may say or whether the ToU is considered a binding contract; you've received notice that your access is unauthorized. The CFAA generally applies to any computer access, as the Commerce Clause has been interpreted as applying to completely intra-state transactions (ignoring the fact that most computer access crosses state lines, which would make it a federal issue anyway), and thus, effectively all computers attached to the internet are "protected computers". Even if you're able to prevail in the argument that the CFAA is not applicable, there are similarly-worded state statutes, and as mentioned, other issues may federal matters, like alleged copyright and trademark infringement (which is usually alleged in such cases). The CFAA is somewhat grey so if you have a few hundred k or more to flush on your lawyers, go ahead, it's possible that you may win. For most people, it's not relevant, because they can't afford to go head-to-head against a major global corporate entity like Amazon. One of the main goals of such a company is to make the lawsuit as costly as possible for the opposing party, since they have infinity money and they know that their opponent likely doesn't. If you're interested, there have been a handful of cases already litigated on the CFAA. The scrapers usually get smoked hard. Look up Ticketmaster v. RMG Technologies, Craigslist v. 3Taps, Register.com v. Verio, and Facebook v. Power Ventures to get started.

patio11 11y ago

Our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening I was once in a room with Dave McClure and a ~50ish companies he had funded. He announced that he was taking a tour of partnership teams at two members of AppAmaGooBookSoft and asked for who wanted to come with. A handful of hands were raised. Dave McClure got frothing mad, and not his normal frothing character mad, but I think actually angry. "LISTEN UP. 80% of you are building on these platforms. If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS. You will %(#)%#0 fail. If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me." I don't think I'd phrase it like that, but the core message is exactly correct. The standard platform deal is, indeed, in the event of an issue you can write to an inbox that no one reads. You do not want that deal. You should, as early as practical, identify an actual human inside the mothership and convince them to like you. You should then lateral from that actual human to other actual humans so that you do not lose your beachhead if your actual human is re-assigned. If you do not do this, when you inevitably have a problem, you will be reduced to taking it to the HN front page and hoping an actual human takes pity on you. Pity is a much less likely outcome than convincing an actual human than you are scads better than their median semi-anonymous participant in the partnership program, which is pretty easy, because their median participant is terrible and all processes are designed to treat them as such. I am aware that this some people will perceive this as unfair because getting better-than-publicly-available access to one's business partners seems like you're at a position of advantage vis-a-vis the people who can only send mails to /dev/null. Is this an advantage? Yes. If you believe this is an unfair advantage, I would strongly counsel you to negotiate honestly and in good faith with your counterparties at your largest business partner and source of existential risk, and not worry so much about other putative businesses which are not sophisticated enough to negotiate honestly and in good with faith their core suppliers.

gizmodo59 11y ago
"identify an actual human inside the mothership" This is so valuable. I was intrigued by who wrote this and no wonder it is Patrick. (I highly recommend this article by him: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...). My two cents: Talk to human. Develop social skills they matter more than what you think.

PaulHoule 11y ago

name.toLower().contains("zombie") -> FAIL you FAIL

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Saying fail is a lowercase fail. Saying fail with code is an uppercase FAIL.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  FAIL!
  - dang 11y ago
    Please don't do this here.
PaulHoule 11y ago
What is it with the downvotes? Zombie is the moe of American culture; you just take something good put Zombie on it, and then idiots will lap it up at the movie theatre.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  JustSomeNobody is right. fail-as-a-noun is in the same dumb bucket as overuse of zombies. Also outside of extreme cases, a silly product name should not be a big problem.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Sure, but where was all this sober reasonable wisdom earlier this week when dozens of comments were aghast at "Boom"? Although, if ever there were a company closure about which one couldn't be too sure...

mwexler 11y ago

All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything. So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from merchants. Same for Travel sites/aggregators, and for review sites: You either get folks to pay for them (of which Angie's List was the only kind of success) or you get vendors to pay you (Yelp, any affiliate aggregator (Creditcards.com, etc.), price engines). I guess I wonder: I love CamelCamelCamel, I loved PriceZombie, I loved PriceRunner and Jango and all the rest... but they keep going away. Google killed google shopping comparisons, as did the other portals. We can probably all think of ones we used that are all gone now. What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? And given that many merchants are creating terms of service to block displaying of their prices (we see this also in the travel industry), will one of the earliest dreams of the internet, that of a flat marketplace where I can evaluate all players and their pricing and pick the best store for me, still fail to come to life? It feels like online shopping has become a big mall, where I have to go to as many sites as I can find til I get tired and just buy the thing at the most recent site (or just trust that Amazon is the cheapest). I hope we can avoid this fate. (Update: fixed typos)

meritt 11y ago
CamelCamelCamel has not went anywhere. But they also don't serve affiliate links as far as I can tell, so their revenue model (if they have one) is not dependent on an affiliate relationship.
- designtofly 11y ago
  CCC does serve affiliate links. If you go to any product page on CCC and click the "Buy" button, you'll end up at Amazon and the URL will have the "tag=camelproducts-20" for their affiliate code in the URL. I'm sure every Amazon-bound link on their website or browser plug-in will do the same.

manmal 11y ago

Here in Austria, Amazon pays the major price comparison website to be listed: www.geizhals.at And I hear it's not cheap for them.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Well, being listed on a price comparison website is basically advertising, and can funnel a lot of traffic to Amazon if they are often the cheaper or better choice. This service just used referrals to make a bit of money instead, probably because there's a lot more price comparison website competition in the US and Amazon doesn't want to fund them all to get listed. They get away with it too, because a price comparison website is not feasible without having amazon as one of the shops.
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
It works in Austria because of how many people use Geizhals: basically everybody in certain categories who is a regular shopper. They have a huge reach.
lazyjones 11y ago
That's not strictly true. Amazon pays affiliate fees, not for being listed. I can't disclose details, but Amazon apparently has no issues with big CSEs (Idealo.de, billiger.de) but obviously they don't like sites that focus on deal "sniping" (like PriceZombie and "deal" sites) as much, since that cuts into their margins (people buy mostly temporarily low-margin offers through such sites and affiliate fees are too expensive there).

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

> Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with other stores, please contact us at support@pricezombie.com Yeah, that's really going to help your situation. 1) You built your product on top of someone else's service. That's always a rocky road. It is common to read about other companies in your shoes. 2) In the time you were operating you couldn't make a single contact at Amazon in case stuff happens?

jonknee 11y ago
And Amazon isn't scared of the situation, they just don't want to subsidize it. Not really surprising.
AznHisoka 11y ago
Definitely not defending them, but sometime's initiating contact can be a tricky thing. Because they may not have paid attention to you, and now you're basically told them "Hi, I exist!". Then later in a meeting, someone in Amazon says "Oh hey.. this site exists. I didn't know that... isn't that a violation of our TOS..??"
- uremog 11y ago
  Or even: that's not a violation ... well then make it one!
InsideTrack 11y ago
1. PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon. PriceZombie indexes products and prices in over 100 online retailers. The developers always had the option of using the PZ website as a front end to gather personal shopping habits and other data that is valuable to advertising and marketing companies - which is what many (most?) price trackers do as their primary source of revenue. PZ opted to get their funding from retailers instead. People purchased mostly from Amazon, therefor when Amazon pulled their affiliate program funding dried up and PZ had a choice - go to the dark side, close up, or sell. 2. They had many contacts, some of them quite high. PZ is a very ethical and methodical company. They dotted their i's and crossed their t's. They had an open dialog with Amazon where they were repeatedly told, in writing and on the phone, that they were in full compliance and there was no problem. The problem with Amazon is inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules. The developers are in discussions now with companies that want to purchase the technology - including my own, though I don't think we can afford them. This is no garage set up by comp sci students. The developers have impressive credentials and they have created a very impressive system that has wide application to other uses.

specialp 11y ago

It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days. Early on in my computer shopping days I'd hit pricewatch and buy from random vendors based on price. Eventually this company called Newegg often had the near the lowest price always and had great service. I soon went to shopping at Newegg consistently without bothering to go to pricewatch. Newegg could have raised prices slightly but I did not want to waste time with untrusted vendors. The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.

djsumdog 11y ago
I recently did a fresh computer build for the first time since 2005. I was use to using PriceWatch for parts and buying from smaller stores. I've actually been out of the country for four years, and upon my return, I see most of the small shops are gone. The lowest prices seem to always be Newegg, Amazon, SuperBizz and Microcenter. They've pretty much squished out a lot of the market, and it seems like Newegg allows other vendors to sell through it just like Amazon. It's kinda sad really. The last city I lived in still had computer stores. The one I moved to doesn't...at all. There are some recycled PC stores, but the only new parts store is a Frys way out of the city. Fuck Frys too.
gdulli 11y ago
I never got Prime because the yearly cost of it (even before the price went up) did not amortize to an acceptable shipping cost. I take the slower free shipping because I'm not impatient or buying on impulse. So I've never been locked into Amazon and always been free to shop around. And I can absolutely confirm that Amazon is no longer the "default" winner on price. Sometimes they are, but often not. I don't even have to spend a lot of time shopping around to find this. The same deals are everywhere now.

tylercubell 11y ago

For PriceZombie and many other businesses, depending on one major revenue source to survive can be a death sentence and at the very least pose an existential risk. Let this be a hard lesson in diversification.

hvo 11y ago

Padmapper was forced to shut down too by Craigslist.When are we going to learn that this type of business model is unsustainable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455

gdulli 11y ago
Yeah if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything. You might leech some money off someone else's marketplace for a while but don't expect it to last.
- mthoms 11y ago
  >if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything If you're regurgitating in a manner that is beneficial for both parties and the customer then I'd say you've created something extremely valuable. Just ask Google.
stale2002 11y ago
Padmapper ended up fine though.... They just got acquired for millions.

jijji 11y ago

If your objective is to write a crawler that parses pricing information from a third party web site, then write the crawler. Relying on the third party to provide a consistent API that can be remotely communicated with is setting yourself up for failure. These companies can quickly ban you from their platform when using their API. At least by writing the crawler yourself, you're making it much more difficult for them to do this. Another lesson is that building a business model around the availability of a third party is also a recipe for failure.

djsumdog 11y ago
I don't think that would have mattered here. They were generating revenue from the Affiliate API. Even if they made a scraper and used that for price data instead, they're still violating the TOS for the Affiliate program. It wouldn't matter how they go the data.
- johnward 11y ago
  I don't remember, nor can I find, any reference to not using historical pricing data with amazon associates: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement/ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement... The specific section on pricing in the api doc (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/agreement.html/ref=amb_link_353005802_15?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=assoc-center-1&pf_rd_r=&pf_rd_t=501&pf_rd_p=&pf_rd_i=assoc_operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...) seems to indicate historical pricing is allowed if you display the date with it: "(o) You will include a date/time stamp adjacent to your display of pricing or availability information on your application if you obtain Product Advertising Content from a Data Feed, or if you call the Product Advertising API or refresh the Product Advertising Content displayed on your application less frequently than hourly. However, during the same day on which you requested and refreshed the pricing and availability information displayed on your application, you may omit the date portion of the stamp. Examples of acceptable messaging include: Amazon.com Price: $32.77 (as of 01/07/2008 14:11 PST - Details) Amazon.com Price: $32.77 (as of 14:11 PST - More info) Additionally, you must either include the following disclaimer adjacent to the pricing or availability information or provide it via a hyperlink, popup box, scripted popup, or other similar method: "Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product." In the above examples, "Details" and "More info" would provide a method for the end user to read the disclaimer." Update: I'm thinking it's probably a violation of this: "(n) You will not store or cache Product Advertising Content consisting of an image, but you may store a link to Product Advertising Content consisting of an image for up to 24 hours. You may store other Product Advertising Content that does not consist of images for caching purposes for up to 24 hours, but if you do so you must immediately thereafter refresh and re-display the Product Advertising Content by making a call to the Product Advertising API or retrieving a new Data Feed and refreshing the Product Advertising Content on your application immediately thereafter."

ryao 11y ago

I am going to miss their price protection tracker that emailed when the price dropped within a certain period of time following a purchase. That let me get the difference refunded by my credit card company.

heyplanet 11y ago

UPDATE: Hey, lot's of downvotes for this post. Would be great if you guys could explain why you downvote. Sorry, but not much sympathy from me. 1) You knowingly violated the terms of service. Therefore you are denied service now. Nothing to complain about. Honestly, if the API of my website would be intentionally abused in a way that I explicitly exclude in my TOS, I would be seriously pissed. I would probably think about suing you. Not only denying you further service. 2) You whine, bitch and complain because others did not get the same treatment as you. There are also many murders and robbers who are not in prison. If it would not be allowed to put one criminal into prison unless we put them all into prison, there would be no law and order at all. 3) You encourage the problem. By shutting down just because Amazon kicked you out. Why not address the problem that 90% of your revenue came from one single retailer? Why not talk to the other retailers and the users and see if there is a way to work it out? Do the difficult thing: CREATE! Don't beg! Sorry, if this sounds harsh. I welcome and applaude every tech entrepreneur. But please stand up and fight for the right thing. For a better world. Not just for a bit of profit by bending the rules.

plugnburn 11y ago
Upvoted just to keep the thread and go against "elitist" hivemind.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  How about the "read the article" hivemind? There's a bit of a difference between "knowingly violated the terms of service" and "told we were in 100% compliance with the rules". Also, if you want a dumb crime analogy, imagine a situation where robbers get locked up... but only if they voted for a particular party. Uneven enforcement based on whim is a bad thing. Especially when someone is trying extremely hard to follow the rules.
stale2002 11y ago
They were TOLD that they were 100% in compliance with the rules and that there was no problem. And then one day things changed for no reason.

johnward 11y ago

The lesson here isn't about breaking TOS. The lesson is that if you build a business around a 3rd party API that party can crush you at any moment without reason.

rand1298 11y ago

Amazon associates is corrupt and not worth your time or its existence. They will wait until day 29 of 30 then shut down your account (after they collect revenue) and find any reason to shut your account down. They have no obligation to state a reason in their email to you. It's a scheme at its finest, unless you are willing to settle for working 8 hours a day for 20 dollars a day capped.

johnward 11y ago

The immature part of me would have just done a massive url redirect to a competitor. I would say change the links on the page but that would probably get you in even more legal trouble.

DanBlake 11y ago

Im guessing the reason you were canned was less to do with historical pricing and entirely about the fact you let them compare with other sites. I am fairly certain amazon hates that with a passion and is in fact why you dont see that feature on CCC. Also, Its my understanding that all of these price comparison sites get a severely discounted affiliate rate from amazon- Something like 1%

frozenport 11y ago

Why do they need an account? Can't they just crawl Amazon and get price info? Or is their business only viable if they can collect a percentage of your purchase?

brianwawok 11y ago
Exactly. Affiliate is their only profit. Sure they can crawl and link, but they would get 0 profit from that.

viach 11y ago

Why didn't they come to an agreement with one of the Amazon's competitors? It sounds like a logical next step which needs to be taken to survive.

girkyturkey 11y ago

This is such a shame... I really enjoyed PriceZombie to display old prices, even though they shouldn't have been doing this. I wonder why Amazon changed their mind after 3 years?

pink_dinner 11y ago

"However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening. " This is pretty standard for Amazon marketplace seller services. They take a 16%+ cut of all of your sales and have absolutely nobody to help you when your account is banned or disabled by one of their auto bots. This happened to a client of mine a few years back. Near 100% feedback, complying with every rule, and one day they get the ban hammer (for a claim that was later withdrawn by the original person that filed it). Amazon withheld $50,000 for over 3 months while they were 'investigating'. After 3 emails where Amazon responded with canned responses, they said the matter was 'closed' and all future emails would not be answered. Do NOT do business with Amazon. You will end up sorry and probably without a business. As as an associate or marketplace seller, they own all of your clients and you are responsibly for anything bad that happens. When you get kicked, they have all of your data, your clients, and your money for 90 days. On top of this, they compete with their own marketplace sellers (unlike Ebay) and use all of your sales information to undercut you. I witnessed it many times with the above client. This should be against the law. I think the only reason they haven't been sued out of existence is because their so big.

shostack 11y ago

As others here have noted, the affiliate game is a risky one. You are in essence a sales rep for whichever merchant(s) you work with. A merchant has ZERO legal obligation to continue working with you, and can often discriminate against you as they see fit, terms be damned. If you don't own the relationship with your primary source of revenue, your business is built on a rocky foundation, and if the weather is fickle enough, you can be washed away overnight. Having been an affiliate, managed an affiliate program, and worked with an OPM to manage the program, I can say that stuff like this happens all the time in the industry, and that's why the #1 rule for affiliates is "diversify diversify diversify."

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I find such actions puzzling, in a world where (charge per click) CPC advertising no longer works due to click fraud, (charge per action) CPA advertising offers a sane alternative. Only pay for the actions of customers, if someone buys, you pay, if they don't, you owe nothing. And yet CPA is treated like a really off color way to feed a few pennies to bloggers. In this case Amazon doesn't like past prices being stored and shown. Ok, I get it that doing so exposes sellers who price high during "rush" seasons and low during "off" seasons, or the difference in price quoted to a Dallas IP address versus one from San Francisco, but shouldn't those sorts of shenanigans be exposed?

elorant 11y ago

Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?

lazyjones 11y ago
Crawling Amazon is no longer feasible if you want up-to-date prices. There's 10s of millions of pages to crawl, it takes too long. I believe they also added captchas against excessive crawling (perhaps via Tor only).
sangnoir 11y ago
It wouldn't make a difference: it is their affiliate account was that was closed - which is how they earned money. Affiliate account = getting paid "kickbacks" by Amazon for customer referalls from PZ's site that result in purchases.
cookiecaper 11y ago
It wouldn't matter. If Amazon didn't want them accessing their servers, they could file suit under the CFAA. They could also allege copyright infringement, since judges have ruled that the temporary copy of a page stored in RAM from which factual non-copyrightable data is extracted (as would be the case on an Amazon product page) constitutes an infringing copy, and trademark infringement and dilution. The existing body of law is very hostile to scrapers. Server access is treated like access to land. The "owner" can kick you off whenever they want.

unclebucknasty 11y ago

They note that Amazon is "afraid of services that compare their prices with other stores". It's more likely Amazon just doesn't see the value. Why would they want to pay a company to drive traffic to Amazon, only when Amazon's prices are lower? Otherwise, they actively drive traffic to their competitors? Amazon is not in dire need of traffic, and with their algorithmic pricing, information is an advantage. Perhaps there is a business case that can be made. But, OTOH, it doesn't strike me as irrational that Amazon would rather not.

DiabloD3 11y ago

Dear PriceZombie: I will pay you $x a year to keep your service functional. Go figure out what x is, given the number of active users you have , and what it costs to keep the service open. Also, email me at pmcfarland@exelion.net. I am a service provider, I might be able to help you cut down your cost of operating.

samp615 11y ago

This blog is "loser talk".

zaroth 11y ago

Probably too late to comment (what a shame discussion is so time limited) but what interests me about this story is that they call out hosting costs as the reason to shut down. I would love to see numbers from this operation, like we saw after Everpix. I would love to understand the scale, if it really would cost so much to host it? So perhaps the actual take away is they didn't really violate the ToS as it is written, but they got kicked out and should have known it would happen. They may have been targeted because they show competitors pricing. Either way, it's sad to lose the service, but hard to chase those customers, because the customer won't pay. They are trying to sell the IP and maybe the company, and apparently there's some sturdy tech with broad applications! What's so tricky is the dispute isn't about API access for the latest pricing, but rather their affiliate revenue. That can be canceled for any reason at any time, so that they still get the API and could find other revenue streams is a key point. They are not "entitled" to Amazon affiliate revenue, so then the question is -- where's the story?

jazoom 11y ago

This is sad. I really feel for them. I'm making a similar website for another country and am planning to bring it to the US later this year. It will largely fill the gap of Price Zombie. Big shoes to fill, though.