This part is the one I'd be most worried about:<p>"They also wiped all the commission fees we were keeping there."<p>Amazon can be a jerk and unilaterally change the rules, but wiping out their commision goes beyond that. I know Google does the same, but it's not an example to follow.<p>It's odd because Amazon has got a good reputation as a fair arbiter of disputes for buyers, but it seems not in this case.<p>Things like these might impact the perception in other cases, I always thought Amazon AWS would have better customer support than Google's developer offerings, this might make me rethink that (I never had to contact AWS support yet and read mostly positive things about them, so this is surprising).<p>I guess they violated some provision of the Amazon TOS?
A couple of months ago Amazon changed <i>its own</i> price tracker to make it much less useful than it was before. I'm talking about the "Important messages about items in your Cart" that appears at the top of your cart when any prices have changed since the last time you viewed it.<p>They've had this feature for many years, of course. It used to be an incredibly verbose list with a bunch of boilerplate text repeated for every item, and the items were in apparently random order.<p>With only a few items in your cart this wouldn't matter much, but I use the Saved Items for a list of things I might want to pick up sometime but don't need right now. So I may have as many as a hundred items or more there. With Amazon prices fluctuating as much as they do - often by only a few pennies - it was hard to spot the more interesting price changes.<p>A couple of years ago they made some nice improvements to this feature on both the desktop and mobile sites. All the boilerplate was pulled out making the list much easier to scan, and the list was sorted in descending order by price change. So the items with the most interesting price changes were right at the top.<p>But a couple of months ago this list took a big step downhill. On mobile, the item names are no longer tappable links, and on both desktop and mobile the sorting was taken out! The list is still nicely formatted, but it's back in random order again, so the items with significant price changes are hard to find among all the two-or-three-penny changes.<p>I thought this was probably just a bug, but now I wonder if it was a deliberate move on Amazon's part. It seems they not only want to shut down third party price trackers, they don't want their own tracker to be very easy to use either.
The scary part of this isn't that they were denied access. It's that they were denied with no opportunity for appeal.<p>As an entrepreneur this is probably one of the number 1 nightmare scenarios: one day you're in business, the next day you're not.<p>We always say never build a business off an ecosystem you don't control but the fact is there are many, many businesses that do just fine from it - and on the flip side, even non-ecosystem businesses are fragile in other ways (such as Uber being regulated into illegality in certain parts of the US and Asia).<p>That's just business! Somewhere, someone is just waiting to fuck you over :) the challenge is to make your fortune or build up your defenses before they do!
My price comparison tool Shoptimate.com got hit a few months back. It's not Amazon only so I can keep the lights on but it sucks for Pricenoia.<p>Amazon has been changing the rules lately. They're not allowing installable software anymore and only allowing mobile apps that are not focused on shopping. They also refuse websites optimized for mobile. This is after they excluded affiliates over the state tax issues in the US.<p>Wikipedia says that Amazon gets 40% of their revenue from affiliates. They're probably dominant enough that they don't need to rely on affiliates as much as they used to.
<i>On a side note, Amazon does not allow the use of its API for price trackers, they made that clear, and has lately made it very difficult to get the data in other ways.</i><p>If people can still access the same data just by going to Amazon with their browser, I don't see any fundamental reason why they wouldn't be able to get the data if they really wanted to. I've always believed that APIs on websites are more than just convenience - they're a way for corporations to exert control over the data they give out, sort of like DRM.<p>In the same way, they're also pretty trivial to circumvent; with webscraping, the major issue is that your traffic stands out, but distribute it widely enough and it won't look anything different from the <i>massive</i> traffic Amazon gets already. You could make a browser plugin and have your users do it for you (just make sure your privacy policies are stated clearly...!)<p>I'm willing to bet that Amazon's data is already being scraped by many other sites, so that also gives rise to this similarity: the "pirates" win, the "legitimate users" going through their API lose.
They mention <a href="http://camelcamelcamel.com/" rel="nofollow">http://camelcamelcamel.com/</a> - but I don't get why they haven't got the axe as well.
I've not seen priceonia before - what's the difference between that and camelcamelcamel?<p>Reading the blog post it seems as though camelcamelcamel will be forced to shut at soon, too?
Just found and have been using PriceZombie <a href="http://www.pricezombie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pricezombie.com/</a> ... does this effect them as well?
This is the norm with Amazon.<p>They will shutdown your account, take your money, and ignore your emails/not give you any real reason why they shut it down.<p>Amazon is an evil company that abuses their monopoly position on a daily basis.<p>On top of this, when you are a seller, they get to keep your customers. You can't contact them outside of Amazon or get any personal info.
<a href="http://www.tropicalprice.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tropicalprice.com</a> is another alternative, without the fancy features of pricenoia like graphs and other info.
I was looking at the Uber API, and thought about comparing prices between Uber and Lyft... then I read this blog post on Pricenoia and it changed my mind.<p>It does seem like a gamble to work with a company's API. It also seems like free work, but perhaps with donations you could make it work.
Semantics3 (www.semantics3.com) has been tracking Amazon for almost 2 years now (we have price histories to boot!). We can, and do still offer price comparison functionality for products sold on Amazon; you can also compare these prices against other domains.