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Just a single data point: I'm an e-commerce seller. I sell on both Amazon and my own website. When I raise prices on Amazon to offset Amazon's fees, Amazon buri

Just a single data point: I'm an e-commerce seller. I sell on both Amazon and my own website. When I raise prices on Amazon to offset Amazon's fees, Amazon buries my listings and hides the buy button. To restore the listing, I have to reduce Amazon's price to match my site's or raise prices on my site to match Amazon. It's not hard for them to find my website because I have to give it to them in the onboarding process to prove I'm authorized to sell my product.

kazinator 3y ago
If that's so, can't you find out where they are connecting from (or other attributes) and show them a different website?
- mtlynch 3y ago
  How would one distinguish an Amazon bot visitor from a legitimate visitor? Unless Amazon goes out of it's way to announce itself (and why would it?), I don't see how a merchant would identify an Amazon price checking bot.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    This is not something that can be solved with speculation; only hands-on. If I had to solve the problem, my first line of attack would be to feed them a domain or URL only they know about, if possible. So that if there are visitors, they must be Amazon insiders. I'd look for any helpful clues in their access information or patterns. I'd make sure that only entities which can solve a Captcha can view the price information. If Amazon uses humans for this task, I'm guessing they are low-paid overseas workers. We may be able to feed them different content based on geography, which will work if the target market for our products is the developed world. Other ideas: I'd have the prices appear not as text but images only. OCR would be required to get the numeric value. Time based: high prices appear on the site first in text form, but after a javascripted time delay, they are covered up by images showing the real price. The robot would have to execute the time delay to wait for the real data, and OCR it from images. Another idea: don't show prices at all, except to logged-in users who have created an account on your site, verified by e-mail. Offer lower prices through a non-web channel. If you can get some users to subscribe to a newsletter, there you can publish secret URL's that unlock discounts. Anyway, I'm confident I could outwit Amazon with one brain hemisphere tied behind my back. (Left or right, doesn't matter).
    - mtlynch 3y ago
      It doesn't sound like you have much experience in e-commerce as almost all of these ideas are wildly impractical. Hiding prices or playing games with prices means I'm significantly degrading experience for my real customers for the sake of maybe fooling Amazon. Giving them a fake domain doesn't work because they're independently crawling the web looking for other merchants of the product and could find my real domain. Offering lower pricing to newsletter subscribers would work, but that's what everyone does anyway and Amazon isn't trying to compete with coupon deals.

kazinator 3y ago

If that's so, can't you find out where they are connecting from (or other attributes) and show them a different website?

mtlynch 3y ago
How would one distinguish an Amazon bot visitor from a legitimate visitor? Unless Amazon goes out of it's way to announce itself (and why would it?), I don't see how a merchant would identify an Amazon price checking bot.
- kazinator 3y ago
  This is not something that can be solved with speculation; only hands-on. If I had to solve the problem, my first line of attack would be to feed them a domain or URL only they know about, if possible. So that if there are visitors, they must be Amazon insiders. I'd look for any helpful clues in their access information or patterns. I'd make sure that only entities which can solve a Captcha can view the price information. If Amazon uses humans for this task, I'm guessing they are low-paid overseas workers. We may be able to feed them different content based on geography, which will work if the target market for our products is the developed world. Other ideas: I'd have the prices appear not as text but images only. OCR would be required to get the numeric value. Time based: high prices appear on the site first in text form, but after a javascripted time delay, they are covered up by images showing the real price. The robot would have to execute the time delay to wait for the real data, and OCR it from images. Another idea: don't show prices at all, except to logged-in users who have created an account on your site, verified by e-mail. Offer lower prices through a non-web channel. If you can get some users to subscribe to a newsletter, there you can publish secret URL's that unlock discounts. Anyway, I'm confident I could outwit Amazon with one brain hemisphere tied behind my back. (Left or right, doesn't matter).
  - mtlynch 3y ago
    It doesn't sound like you have much experience in e-commerce as almost all of these ideas are wildly impractical. Hiding prices or playing games with prices means I'm significantly degrading experience for my real customers for the sake of maybe fooling Amazon. Giving them a fake domain doesn't work because they're independently crawling the web looking for other merchants of the product and could find my real domain. Offering lower pricing to newsletter subscribers would work, but that's what everyone does anyway and Amazon isn't trying to compete with coupon deals.