5 ms·

I talked once to a dev who does this sort of thing. Its common. It's also interesting to consider what options folks have for quick, easy short-circuit algorith

I talked once to a dev who does this sort of thing. Its common. It's also interesting to consider what options folks have for quick, easy short-circuit algorithms. Any ideas for clever hacks to prevent the totally absurd with minimal state retention needed? When I started talking about moving averages and trend related metrics, the person I was talking to commented that they where doing this in Excel or an Access database and wouldn't know how to handle that with say 250,000 books they might know or care about... then again maybe the downside of having one random crazy price is not even worth a cheap hack.

ikeboy 6y ago
There's a whole ecosystem of SaaS doing this fairly priced for smaller sellers, along with unfairly priced SaaS for large sellers (some take a percentage or more of revenue). Anyway for repricing just have a hard max of 1k or so, and lower prices if it doesn't sell after six months and again after a year, two years, etc.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  What makes the SaaS pricing manager unfairly priced?
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    Having used one briefly (Feedvisor) several years ago, they attach a very heavy handed enterprise sales operation to a mediocre platform. A single digit percentage of sales is insane. I got calls every few months for years afterwards trying to get me to try them again. They raised $30M+ and built out a strong sales team.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      That sounds like it was priced higher than you cared to pay. I don’t find Ferraris unfairly priced; I just don’t buy them because they are too high priced for my preferences.
      - ikeboy 6y ago
        If you define fairness so that literally everything is fairly priced, sure. My definition is different.
hobofan 6y ago
I've worked in this space before (though ~5 years ago), and I would say that most of the solutions are so unsophisticated that any measures to prevent this, like the ones you propose, would likely be completely overkill. AFAIK, there have also been some safeguards added into the MWS API itself, which prevent too drastic price changes to be uploaded, which prevent those bugs from surfacing nowadays.

ikeboy 6y ago

There's a whole ecosystem of SaaS doing this fairly priced for smaller sellers, along with unfairly priced SaaS for large sellers (some take a percentage or more of revenue). Anyway for repricing just have a hard max of 1k or so, and lower prices if it doesn't sell after six months and again after a year, two years, etc.

sokoloff 6y ago
What makes the SaaS pricing manager unfairly priced?
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Having used one briefly (Feedvisor) several years ago, they attach a very heavy handed enterprise sales operation to a mediocre platform. A single digit percentage of sales is insane. I got calls every few months for years afterwards trying to get me to try them again. They raised $30M+ and built out a strong sales team.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    That sounds like it was priced higher than you cared to pay. I don’t find Ferraris unfairly priced; I just don’t buy them because they are too high priced for my preferences.
    - ikeboy 6y ago
      If you define fairness so that literally everything is fairly priced, sure. My definition is different.

hobofan 6y ago

I've worked in this space before (though ~5 years ago), and I would say that most of the solutions are so unsophisticated that any measures to prevent this, like the ones you propose, would likely be completely overkill. AFAIK, there have also been some safeguards added into the MWS API itself, which prevent too drastic price changes to be uploaded, which prevent those bugs from surfacing nowadays.