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Comment by nitsuaeekcm | Hacker News Reader

For those who use Amazon and want cost perspective on particular items, Camelcamelcamel is a superpower (https://camelcamelcamel.com/)

I’m sure one day I’ll find out they make money in all sorts of sketchy ways, but in the mean time it’s a great free website, and I’m continually astounded to see how often retailers play around with the prices they post.

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They do money by adding their affiliate code to the links.

However the Amazon Affiliate TOS [0] say:

(y) Unless otherwise agreed by Amazon, your Site must not have price tracking and/or price alerting functionality.

I see many sites with this functionality. I don't know if they all got approved by Amazon or they are not enforcing this clause.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies...

They're a part of the affiliate program, and they are price tracking, so I would say they have implicit permission, or else they would have been long kicked off of the affiliate program.

I recall reading that the reason CamelCamelCamel is permitted is because they ONLY price track Amazon (vs tracking multiple retailers), but I can't recall where that came from.

Maybe Amazon thinks camelcamelcamel is helping more than hurting?

Well I do use them to "time" purchases through Amazon, not look at other retailers to make my purchase location decision.

I have alerts setup there to alert me when the price gets to $x, 1 of the few places I have setup like that. So in my case, I definitely buy more from Amazon because of the site.

Amazon must think so it's allowed camelcamelcamel to live on for 8+ years I've been using it.

But if they think so why do they have this clause that won't allow CCC competitors?

Terms of Service are universally wishlists of things a legal department may wish to enforce if they are so inclined. In this case, they are not so inclined.

Basically the same as warnings on medications. They list almost every known symptom without any sort of probability so they're almost useless.

They don't list symptoms, they list things that happened in the study population in clinical trials. Which is why every medicine has headache and nausea as 'possible side effects'.

In the EU, the symptoms are listed under headings like "More than 1 in 10 people had this" "Between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100 had this".

e.g. for the Moderna Covid vaccine, PDF, see "Possible side effects": https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/product-information/s...

(I looked up St John's Wort, but its assessment doesn't have this. Possible because it is from a long time ago.)

To be fair that seems like one of the most respectable uses of affil links though. They’re providing actual value on top of what the supplier provides.

Happy for them to take a cut as a result

Just logged into remind everyone CamelCamelCamel shut down Europe sites during the initial Covid outbreak. https://mobile.twitter.com/camelcamelcamel/status/1242179105...

I remember reading price gouging from Amazon was revealed some months later. I wonder if they wanted to stop this being shown so blatantly.

It speaks to the truth of the original post that I set up a ton of price alerts six months ago and exactly zero of them have gone off.

I had one go off this morning. Second battery for my vacuum cleaner. Hooray.

That page could use the help of a designer / ux person. Things from the 90s look better than that.

keepa.com is an alternative. It has a Chrome extension that embeds the price graph on Amazon. Extremely useful.

This gives you some idea, but it doesn't include coupons, deals and lightning sales in the tracking.

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