[shibel]

Yeah, I also wondered how quick would it be to ~~rip off~~ replicate “diskprices.com for X” and took a weekend (ok more) to build https://tvpricesindex.com (Also using HTMX).

TVs are much less of a “commodity” of course, but it’s a nice experiment that I’ll iterate on a bit more with time. Also, first deploy on Railway (was nice enough, definitely compared to Heroku, but they have a way to go), and using other libraries I wanted to learn.

Will probably start grouping models better soon, and offer other filters.

BTW: If you plan to do something like this with PAAPI (Product Advertising API), know that Amazon has the constant axe of banning you if you don’t generate “qualified” sales for 30 days straight.

[attilakun]

The Amazon PAAPI is "interesting" because to even access it, you need to have 3 qualified sales. But... I wanted to use the API to create a website where I'd post the affiliate links on. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. That's why I went with eBay.

[shibel]

Yep, I don't have much experience with affiliate programs (I like to build more SaaS-like apps[1]) but from my research Amazon have gotten really stingy circa 2019. Happy to see an alternative.

[1] I didn't know about the 3-sales precondition either. I guess some people bought albums on Amazon on my other music-related app.

[hi_hi]

Yep, I'm fighting this battle at the moment. I got the required 3 sales, but then they rejected me a few days later. From the rejection email "Your website/app did not meet our content standards as the content on your site is insufficient."

There's clearly precedent as I know Jeremies diskprices qualifies. Fingers crossed that Amazon play fair...

[attilakun]

I don't understand their worries. What are they trying to achieve with this? I can understand e.g. not wanting to have affiliate links on fraudulent/deceptive websites, but how is a search interface hurting anybody?

[gitinit]

Using Selenium, even headlessly, Amazon prices can easily be scraped. This could be turned into an API without much difficulty, I imagine.

[shibel]

Yeah, my first lines of Python (or code) were Selenium/BeautifulSoup. The problems with these are sensitivity for (DOM) changes, speed, and scale (not that I'm too concerned with those at the moment, it's just a fun refreshing project).