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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[+] [-] L1quid|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] AnssiH|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imheretolearn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mike_Jordan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|5 years ago|reply
Will it ever start working again?
[+] [-] nobody9999|5 years ago|reply
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 again for your very useful site!
[+] [-] Kosirich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antupis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogetti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxienin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zvr|5 years ago|reply
Happy user since Fri 25 Mar 2011 (I just checked).
[+] [-] shaklee3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sam___D|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bmarquez|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] avipars|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomc1985|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmac|5 years ago|reply
Edit: to see it, you’ll likely first have to go to and enable Settings > Shortcuts > Allow untrusted shortcuts.
[+] [-] zxienin|5 years ago|reply
If they see value in CCC, why not natively add the feature themselves? If price history is made transparent, consumers also don’t have trust issues.
[+] [-] gmac|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ycombinete|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CapriciousCptl|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pottertheotter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avipars|5 years ago|reply
They don't want people to stop shopping because it's not a "good deal"
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SquareWheel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amznamznamzn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikehollinger|5 years ago|reply
A cursory look at the privacy policies for it didn’t yield much either way for me.
[+] [-] VectorLock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxienin|5 years ago|reply
I then found keepa.com which has been good, if not better than CCC.
[+] [-] ChaitanyaSai|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] creditsuisse|5 years ago|reply
P.S. using camelcamelcamel and also Honey
[+] [-] CommanderData|5 years ago|reply
There was also news that Amazon increased their prices during the pandemic? Do you data to suggest this is true?
[+] [-] xnx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siquick|5 years ago|reply
"This page has been temporarily disabled due to abusive traffic from someone else."
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iamwil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avipars|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/israelbestsales
[+] [-] brutus1213|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branon|5 years ago|reply
Were it not for CCC, I'd imagine I'd use Amazon even less than I do right now. Possibly not at all.