Thank you to everyone who uses our website. We are fortunate to have been able to run it for so long.
Edit: Camel+YC fact: we pitched to YC early on, but weren't ready to give up our day jobs at the time. A few months later, we had left our jobs anyway. Not necessarily because the site was doing so well...
Is there a reason your "Buy" links for amazon.de include "&language=de_DE" in the URL?
It changes my account language to German and causes Amazon to send me a "your account language was changed" email, so it kind of makes me avoid your direct links...
A lot of people, including me, are using amazon.de in English, as they have free shipping to quite a few European countries (and e.g. http://www.amazon.fi/ redirects there).
Do you find that Amazon.de has better offers than others in Europe? I usually shop on my own country TLD and didnt't think before of checking if .de or any other has better offers and free shipping
Amazon doesn't have a TLD for every country. It's super weird what they support...
Amazon.lu (luxemberg) but no amazon.be (Belgium). Amazon.at (austria) but no amazon.ch (Switzerland). No Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, but they do have Lichtenstein, Poland, Denmark. No Slovakia (sk) but they do have Czech (cz).
There is no Amazon for my country, and delivery is faster from Germany, than most other. But my German in not that good, and prefer English.
Not having local amazon blows. You can buy prime but shipping isn't free or next day (best case 3 days usual around 5), a lot of the shows wont show etc. Also random thing will decide that they wont ship from one amazon, but will ships from some other. Also returns are expensive.
For small purchases I don't care that much (and .de has cheaper shipping to me), but for larger purchases I usually price-compare between .de, .co.uk, .fr, .it, .es, .com as the price difference may be significant (i.e. save me hundreds of euros), and all of those sites have had the cheapest price on occasion.
Please consider adding other retailers. Often times, the better deal isn't on Amazon, and there tons of online retailers out there. Price checking historically on N platforms is a much more appealing value proposition.
Not sure what you mean by shopping API, but here is all that their affiliate program policies[0] say about price comparisons with other sites:
> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.
I meant advertising API. Perhaps they have updated their terms for the advertising API, as it appears their affiliate program does allow price comparison now. I believe that was not the case previously.
They have poor naming. There is an Advertising API, and then there's a Product Advertising API which is often called the Product API.
The Advertising API is for advertisers running ads with Amazon Advertising. Apparently they don't allow certain competitors (shopping sites, comparison sites, ad networks) to use it: https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/ad-policy/api
The Product API is for affiliates to fetch product/price information in a reliable way instead of scraping the main site for it. I don't think they've ever prohibited price comparison sites. The last time I really looked into it was several years ago, and they weren't restricted at that point either.
On the other hand, they’re doing something well and hopefully doing well themselves because of it. Growth has an insidious way of taking useful things and ruining them sometimes.
Hey L1quid, great site! I have been using CCC since 2 months and it is amazing. Could you shed some light on how often do you check for price updates? I am asking because I was using it during Prime Day and it seemed like the prices were not immediately updated. Maybe this could be a new addition to the site!
Relevant bits - they continuously poll for new prices but they have a lot of products to request. They batch as best they can but there are request rate limits they have to respect also:
> [00:11:04] JM: Let’s talk about the core the process that you have to do. So in order to build these price models for CamelCamelCamel, there is a repeated usage of this Amazon advertising API that gives you some data on the price. Tell me how that scraping infrastructure works.
> [00:11:27] DG: Sure. So essentially what we do is build a queue of – Or multiple queues of products. We split up things in different ways by the Amazon country. Because, of course, we support all of Europe and North America. Well, Canada and the United States. So we split that up.
> We also prioritize based on user interest. Since we have a finite number of API requests, we have to try to make the most of those. So whether a product is being actively tracked by a user or not, it gets higher priority. Then we use Amazon SQS to create these queues and then we just pop things off the queues and make API requests.
I note that on almost all my price watches (UK site), the prices that CamelCamelCamel shows me are not accurate (most frequently listed as "Not in Stock" when following the link to the product on Amazon shows that they are in stock); this all stopped working, I think, in the early days of Covid? When you were asked to stop doing it to ease load or some such?
Thanks for doing this for the past twelve years! Although I've only been using it for the past twelve minutes. :)
Your 'about' page says:
"The primary feature of our site is the sending of email alerts when prices change. The user simply sets a price threshold at which alerts are generated, and we email you when that condition is met."
Just to confirm, the "price threshold" mentioned will trigger a set alert when the price is at or below the threshold. Is that correct or will it only alert when the exact price is found?
Thanks to your website, I got my Sage coffee machine for 250 euros less than what is sold in local stores and at least 100 euros less that the average price.
Thank you for your work.
Sage Barista Express. Currently going for 550 pounds on amazon.uk, I got it 480. I have it for a year now and I can recommend it, with a warning that it has a unique filter/ion-exchanger requiring you to buy it from Sage.(Breville)
An awful lot of my decision making in the last ~13 years has included the question: what if the Camels don't exist tomorrow? Which isn't particularly unusual for a business, but it can make planning difficult.
No other major retailer has anything close to as many skus as amazon. And for any of the sites that do have a lot of products via 3rd party sellers, most of those products are much higher priced (they are probably being drop shipped from Amazon) and those prices don't change much.
So I think ccc would lose a lot of its usefulness.
Or right now, patience into just getting the damn thing. I just got a new power supply after a couple months of waiting by setting the Amazon price to under $500 and making sure the CCC emails trigger alerts on my phone.
I'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.
This is exactly why I built NamePromo [1], which tracks product stock changes and sends you alerts across many channels (email, sms, mobile push (iOS/Android), our FB & Twitter profiles, and Discord).
We also take requests for any store listing URL and even if we don't support it right now such as Nike for example we will prioritize it and get it added to our queue to support tracking it.
The interesting thing about your point that Amazon and other merchants that have a "notify me" button is that they don't really work for users. However most of their methods are to process new inventory, their notification process is disconnected somehow and delayed for some reason. From the community I've been working to build as well, they all say the platform is much faster than the stores' versions.
I ordered a Logitech C920 from logitech.com today. You have a page for this camera, but logitech.com is not one of the stores listed. At the time I ordered, both the C920 and C922 were in stock, but they're OOS now. So I guess I got lucky.
The Staples price you show is $4 more than the price I paid.
> 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...
I think the only flaw here is that while it may be trivial to get raw data from say fossil, any major multi-department retailer (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, B&H...) is not going to be this easy.
Prices are competitive information, at least competitive enough to warrant obfuscation and preventing scraping.
And, the more sources you have, the more likely things will constantly fail. Scraping is always fragile.
One of the first web-scraping projects I ever built was to find the lowest price for Clif bars. I ate about 365 per year, and in only 45 minutes of programming a cron job and push notifications, I easily saved $100 that year.
As someone who may or may not monitor very elastic competitor pricing (allegedly) I would add that if you are not respectful with your scraping you will get IP banned. You might also get shut down by a provider (e.g. aws).
Services like Crawlera act as a proxy that also forces you to be nice. If anyone is getting into this, I would recommend they use a service like that to scrape at scale.
Honestly I'd prefer if the process didn't even have to "know" sites.
Let me just supply the URL and the price string... and let it automatically figure out the right <div> or class or id or surrounding text it can be extracted from. And if it ever breaks (can't be found, or returns something in a different numeric format) then just notify me to visit it and see what's up.
Command-line is one way to do it (can be the canonical version), but then a browser extension makes it even easier. You'll need a headless browser even from the command-line in any case, since the product info isn't always in the HTML at all.
> 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.
I 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.
10+ 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
If 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.
Off 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.
I don't know the history exactly but I think it's been kind of rocky. Amazon limits CCC to physical (that is, Amazon's lowest margin) goods, ostensibly because of licensing agreements.
Amazon benefits here by sanctioning a price history tool with restrictions when others could take its place and include its higher margin goods (if you look, there are CCC competitors that aren't sanctioned in this way, but you have to look). Less measurably, the price history tracker provides better consumer experience, in line with Amazon's customer obsession. And finally, Amazon's warehouse space isn't unlimited, so informed consumers who know a particular price is extraordinary may help it free up space more quickly.
I 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.
they play a delicate balancing act between many parties. if the real trend of prices became too obvious on a platform so big, it would reduce the effectiveness of limited time sales and marketing spend by a lot.
Out 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.
Possibly 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.
Of 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.
Fun 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.
Hey 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.
I'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?
Their blog[0] has some info. There was a great Software Engineering Daily podcast about it [1] - specifically they use the Amazon Advertising API (still) although the nature of their relationship has changed over the eleven years. I imagine the affiliate rates drastically dropping during Covid, hurt them a fair bit.
It looks like they're part of the Amazon Associates Program which is probably where that banner is from (and it says it further down on the page.). I know there is some API locked behind a signup program for that, so I was curious if thats only what they use or if there is some other scraping going on.
Ive 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.
I recall reading something about how Amazon threatened to block them unless CamelCamelCamel stopped crawling other retailers as well... Surprise, CCC now only does Amazon.
Can't find any info on that so may be mistaken though.
Since 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.
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)
I 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?
Great 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.
This 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) I get this error:
"This page has been temporarily disabled due to abusive traffic from someone else."
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.
That'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.
I'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!
CCC 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.
I'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 ;).
somewhere 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.
A 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.
> 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.
Probably 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.
If 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
If 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 and fix this? We've cut you way more slack than we usually do.
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...