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Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts
- xnx 6y agoGreat service! Even if nothing is new, it deserves more attention. It really helps me cut through the noise of all advertising hoopla of "Big sale", "20%" off, etc. when I can see the full price history of a product.
- bmarquez 6y agoI love CCC. Since yesterday and today are Amazon Prime days, I've been using to compare if the "deals" are really deals. 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.
- avipars 6y agoCool usage. I also was checking those deals and refreshing minute by minute. Luckily I found a good deals blog with everything https://www.aviparshan.com/israeldeals/index.html https://www.aviparshan.com/israeldeals/index.html
- gwern 6y agoI'm a happy CCC user. Great for Amazon price alerts. And it's just worked for me for years.
- bertjk 6y agoI've used CCC the chrome extension for a long time. What is newsworthy here? Is the landing page new?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoHacker News submissions don't have to be new. :)
- akersten 6y agoProbably that it's been around so long, an entire generation of Netizens aren't aware of it. I genuinely had forgotten about it until this post, so it's a nice reminder. 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.
- firekvz 6y agoCCC owners are clearly trying to drive people today to click their affiliate links on prime day :)
- Rebelgecko 6y agoIf anything I feel like it'll discourage sales on prime day. A lot of the non-amazon discounts are lackluster when you compare to what the price was a month ago
- VectorLock 6y agoI've always wondered how CCC interfaced with Amazon. Are they using bots to scrape the site? Are they just coasting along until Amazon tries to shut them down, or is there some kind of agreement in place?
- gdulli 6y agoSince they send traffic to Amazon from people who want to buy things, I don't think Amazon minds. And I don't think they care if they pay out to any one affiliate vs. another.
- VectorLock 6y agoEven if they are sending Amazon traffic, sometimes companies get a little edgy about people aggregating and republishing their data.
- jjeaff 6y agoIt is against Amazon's api terms of service to do price comparison. And they will cut you off, no questions asked, for violating that.
- interestica 6y agoIve wondered too. I mean I've definitely bought things because of a price alert -- and not necessarily that it was that much of a discount. It more or less just reminded me of something I wanted. So, maybe amazon sees it as beneficial.
- asxd 6y agoOn the bottom of the about page [0] they have an "In association with Amazon" badge, so I'm guessing they have Amazon's consent. 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 [0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/about https://camelcamelcamel.com/about
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- siquick 6y agoThis is probably a great site if you're in the US but the prices it's returning to me here in Australia just aren't the same as on Amazon.com/au and when I try and search the local database (https://au.camelcamelcamel.com/products?sq=red+widget https://au.camelcamelcamel.com/products?sq=red+widget) I get this error: "This page has been temporarily disabled due to abusive traffic from someone else."
- lstamour 6y agoInstead of searching, try pasting in a link from the official Amazon AU site and see if that works better for you?
- paulcole 6y agoLol how long has it been since the HN astroturfing article got posted?
- dang 6y agoIf you keep breaking the site guidelines like this we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this? We've cut you way more slack than we usually do.
- crazygringo 6y agoI've used CCC for a long time, but especially in the pandemic I've discovered it's been most useful for simply finding out when something comes back in stock. 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.
- derefr 6y ago> 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 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.
- julianlam 6y ago> 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'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...
- bransonf 6y ago
- L1quid 6y agoThank 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...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imheretolearn 6y agoHey 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!
- lstamour 6y agoHave a listen to https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/24/camelcamelcamel-amazon-price-tracker-with-daniel-green/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/24/camelcamelca... or browse the transcript at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SED837-CamelCamelCamel.pdf 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.
- zxienin 6y agoI use(d) CCC pretty frequently. More than a year back (am vague when precisely), they had >month long downtime due to issue with corrupt backups. I then found keepa.com which has been good, if not better than CCC.
- zxienin 6y agoI find Amazon’s acceptance of CCC interesting. 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.
- ycombinete 6y agoOff the cuff I'd think that they accept it because they view almost anything that causes people to buy from Amazon to be a good thing. 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.
- pottertheotter 6y agoI just noticed today that an item on Amazon had a little notice that said something like, "This is the lowest price in the past month." Not the same as CCC, and the statement could be true even if the price didn't change all month, but I found it interesting.
- zxienin 6y agoCan you post the direct link or screenshot?
- gmac 6y agoIf they added the feature themselves, likely many more people would find it and use it, and the average price paid would drop. 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.
- avipars 6y agoThey actually did something similar with Amazon Assistant (chrome extension). But it only has 30 days of history. They don't want people to stop shopping because it's not a "good deal"
- anonu 6y agoGreat site. Been using it since maybe close to inception. I wonder how much $ you can make on affiliate links.
- iamwil 6y agoHave any of you use CCC as part of a personal workflow automation, say with Huginn or n8n, or even zapier? If so, what did you do with it?
- avipars 6y agoThey have an RSS feed, so I sometimes set notifications for myself, but I'd rather go through a deals group like this instead https://twitter.com/israelbestsales https://twitter.com/israelbestsales
- zxienin 6y agosomewhere in comments, there is mention of Amazon not minding CCC as long as it sends traffic. 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.
- colechristensen 6y agoA huge amount of amazon’s retail business is as a platform for others to sell their products and the revenue/profit from that is a different game than shipped and sold by amazon. 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.
- zxienin 6y ago> huge amount of amazon’s retail business is as a platform for others to sell their products and the revenue/profit from that is a different game than shipped and sold by amazon 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.
- ChaitanyaSai 6y agoGoing to slide in here and plug https://www.bbboookkksss.com https://www.bbboookkksss.com 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)
- tomc1985 6y ago10+ years ago I wrote one of the first browser addons in this space. It was powered by a backend that crawled data for hundreds of merchants, and Amazon was easily one of the most difficult merchants to parse (and I ended up writing a lot of the parsing code). We had entire sections of our codebase dedicated to piercing Amazon's "add to cart to see the price" tactics and other countermeasures they would throw our way. This was all just before AJAX took over the web; I was laid off before I could see how that change affected the company. (I don't think they are around any more) 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
- amznamznamzn 6y agoFun fact: camelcamelcamel.com is specifically excluded from archive.org's Wayback Machine, not through any normal automated mechanism, but by fiat because the higher-ups at archive.org hold large amounts of Amazon stock.
- frakkingcylons 6y agoHave a source for that?
- amznamznamzn 6y agoHere's a site which has been excluded from the Wayback Machine via normal mechanisms: http://web.archive.org/web/*/digital.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/digital.com Here's a site whose presence in the Wayback Machine has been hardcoded out of existence: http://web.archive.org/web/*/camelcamelcamel.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/camelcamelcamel.com
- jjeaff 6y agoWhy would that matter? What harm or benefit would archiving or not archiving ccc have?
- avipars 6y agointeresting
- sevencolors 6y agoFun fact: the amznamznamzn user account was created 11 hrs ago
- thunderbong 6y agoI get this error. Is this expected? consent.cmp.oath.com's server IP address could not be found.
- shostack 6y agoLooks like something related to Verizon's/oaths consent management platform which is used to capture consent to track and use data for advertising.
- SquareWheel 6y agoI switched to https://keepa.com/ https://keepa.com/. The alerts seem more consistent, and there's no affiliate links.
- fogetti 6y agoThey also support the Japanese marketplace
- avipars 6y agoAgreed ;) But I don't mind amazon smile (as money goes to charity as well)
- kamyarg 6y ago+1 I noticed keepa has more accurate data in some instances. CCC was also cool though, I hope they get even better.
- kellenmurphy 6y agoOut of curiosity, why do you care if CCC uses affiliate links? Not trying to troll, just genuinely curious. I figure if CCC gets a bit of a kickback on something that's fair for me using their site as a means of keeping it going.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoPossibly out of privacy concerns?
- aaronax 6y agoPossibly it would be an incentive that is not aligned with the user's interests. For example, CCC would do anything in their power to get you to buy something so that they get a cut. Whereas a user would maybe be most interested in getting a good value, or even not buying anything at all might be their best choice.
- thirdsun 6y agoOf course you as a consumer could also act and decide on your own. 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.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoTip: 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.
- AlexITC 6y agoI remember you don't get a notification unless you visit your basket, where the notification is displayed.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThat's right, when you visit your basket, even if it is empty, you'd get a banner that the price of some items have changed then you can see the list of all of your "saved for later" items for which price/availability has changed.
- gmac 6y agoI made this iOS shortcut which lets you call up the price comparison straight from the share sheet in the Amazon app: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/bad9a103673a47d78c9aea578976b3b0 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/bad9a103673a47d78c9aea57897... Edit: to see it, you’ll likely first have to go to and enable Settings > Shortcuts > Allow untrusted shortcuts.
- avipars 6y agoSpeaking of that, you guys might want to cancel your prime subscription https://sales.aviparshan.com/2020/10/how-to-cancel-your-amazon-prime.html https://sales.aviparshan.com/2020/10/how-to-cancel-your-amaz...
- saos 6y agoI needed this for latest airfryer purchase. Damn.
- brutus1213 6y agoI've been using the site for a few months now and thought it was pretty slick. Nice to meet the creators on HN :) Frankly, I've made lots of excess purchases due to your site .. for most discretionary Amazon purchases, I actually use ccc to verify I am not over paying. Good luck to you!
- cosmolev 6y agoIs there CCC for Aliexpress.com?
- AlexITC 6y agoI built https://github.com/wiringbits/cazadescuentos https://github.com/wiringbits/cazadescuentos, and Aliexpress is in my backlog, if you like, send me an email and I'll let you know when it gets integrated.
- CommanderData 6y agoI recall your service being unavailable during the lock down in the UK. Did you find out why Amazon asked you to stop using their API or shutdown your service temporarily? There was also news that Amazon increased their prices during the pandemic? Do you data to suggest this is true?
- mikehollinger 6y agoHey there! Great service. Does CCC do anything to pull or scrape data from the browser plug-in and resell it or provide analysis back to Amazon or to other companies? A cursory look at the privacy policies for it didn’t yield much either way for me.
- branon 6y agoCCC is great. I use it rarely, only because I intentionally use Amazon itself as rarely as possible. As a result, 100% of my Amazon shopping is done through CCC, which is great. Were it not for CCC, I'd imagine I'd use Amazon even less than I do right now. Possibly not at all.
- srndpty 6y agoI'm surprised Honey hasn't come up in here. They seem to be trying pretty aggressively to be the defacto tool for this sort of thing. I also find it really funny that their premium offering is called "Honey Gold." Do an image search for that ;).
- x87678r 6y agoA few years ago the disks all crashed, did you run your own hardware? I can't remember the details. Have you switched to cloud hosting?
- throwmemoney 6y agoThe price history data shows that the retailer is using AI to increase prices of items in and around pay day in Europe.
- creditsuisse 6y agoI also found another interesting Chrome extension to compare prices between different Amazon, Walmart and Target https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shopping-helper-find-the/hcjoidkfgioghboeledhickmamiomgon?r=hcc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shopping-helper-fi... P.S. using camelcamelcamel and also Honey