A Camel Thing

Our friend Joshua Teitelbaum wrote a Camelizer toolbar for IE users, who surely must have felt left out of all the Camelizer fun happening in Chrome and Firefox.  It adds a Camel search box to your browser which will be automatically populated with Amazon product URLs as you view them, making it easy to jump over to our site and create price watches and/or check price histories.

Download it here!  Please remember: this is an early release, and may be buggy.  It has been virus scanned immediately before upload, and should be considered safe to install, but we recommend scanning it yourself before installing since it’s an EXE file.

Please send all bug reports to dan@shup.com.  Huge thanks to Josh for putting in the effort of writing this thing.

We just launched a new version of our browser extension, The Camelizer, for Google Chrome, and the update dramatically expands its features.

First, if you’re a registered user and are logged into camelcamelcamel while you’re browsing Amazon — or our other sites and their associated retailers — The Camelizer will be aware of this and show you as logged in.  This allows us to do some neat things, like…

Price watch creation and editing, and wishlist importing, is now built-in!  You can do these things from within the extension; there’s no longer a need to go to our site to track products or import your wishlists.  All price watches created by registered users will show up in their account on our site.

And, as our site has allowed since it was launched, The Camelizer also allows people without Camel accounts to create price watches.  Just put in your email address and we’ll alert you when the price drops.

We hope these features make The Camelizer even more useful to all of its users.  If you happen to find a bug, we would definitely appreciate if you could drop us a line and tell us about it.  (We like hearing that things are working great, too!)

Thanks to our newest team member, Lee, who has only been with us six months but is making a massive, positive contribution to the Camels, and is the one responsible for this excellent new version of The Camelizer!

Download The Camelizer v2.3 here if you don’t have it, otherwise Chrome will update the extension automatically.

Since Newegg kicked us out of their affiliate program, we’ve had to find new ways to obtain their data.  This means we are currently unable update existing products, add new products to our database, and send Newegg-related email alerts.  Newegg just cut off the last method we found, so now we’ve got to beg our users for help.

If you’re an affiliate of Newegg and would like to help us out, please email Dan (http://camelcamelcamel.com/contact).  All you have to do is export a Newegg data feed for us; we don’t need access to your affiliate account or anything like that.

Thanks!  Hopefully someone will save Camelegg from death soon.

Google recently updated their system, and that broke our login code.  We’ve just launched an update that should allow our users to login with their Google account again.

We just launched a site update that we hope will make the sign-up process less confusing.  Formerly, users had to verify ownership of their email address before they could even login; this resulted in many confused users emailing us, thinking the site and/or their account was broken.  Now, users can login directly after signing up and will be reminded to verify their email address before they can receive price drop alerts.

Verification is also much easier, as users can simply reply to the “welcome to our site” email we send after registration, and our system will receive the email reply and activate the account.  If you don’t receive the email, you can request another be sent, or you can simply send a message to verify@mail.camelcamelcamel.com from your Camel account’s email address and your account will be activated.

Along with that excellent bit of 90’s technology, we have added another email feature.  Users can now reply to our price drop alerts with “delete” or “unsubscribe” in the body of the reply, and our system will delete the price watch that generated the alert.

We hope these changes will make our site easier to use.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.  As always, we love to hear from you.

Our recent network upgrade broke our support forums.  They are now back online!  We apologize for the inconvenience caused to those users who tried to access them during the outage, and appreciate those who reported the problem via email!

Another stealthy update found its was onto the site today.  We added carousels to all of the row-style products layouts (like what you see on the homepage).  Now when there are more products to display beyond 5 you can click on the right arrow and reveal more.  It’s a tiny enhancement, but we think it helps with navigation.

In other news, we had a bug on the site for non US locales.  It was just a silly javascript error regarding tool tips, but because it failed so inelegantly non-US users saw no images at all on the homepage for a while there.  Sorry WORLD!

People love using the top drop filters on the homepage, so we decided to add them to the popular list on the homepage as well.  Browse the latest Amazon deals by category without suffering the agonies of an additional page view.  Of course, on the homepage you can only see 5 popular products at a time.  The full on popular page is still the place to go for the firehose that is Amazon popular deals.

We’ve just released a new version of The Camelizer, our price tracking browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.  Here are the highlights of the changes we made.

Firefox

This is a big release for Firefox users, as we’ve completely redesigned the extension’s user interface to match that of our Chrome extension.  The result?  No more “add-on bar” buttons to deal with, no more huge Camelizer display at the bottom of your Firefox window, and no more memory leaks (we hope).

“Other Products”

Previous versions of The Camelizer only worked on product detail pages on retailer sites; that is, the Camel icon would only appear if the user was browsing a product page.  This has changed with v2.2, as The Camelizer now detects all products in retailer pages and displays a list of said products, allowing the user to view the price history of any product in a page.  Our extensions will still avoid doing anything on HTTPS pages, to ensure your privacy and browser security are maintained.

To try this new feature, visit any retailer page, like Amazon’s homepage, and click the Camel icon.  You will be shown the “other products” tab which lists all of the products found in the page.  Clicking a product link will display the familiar price history chart.  And a “product page” link will appear inside The Camelizer’s window next to the tabs, linking you to the product’s Amazon page.

Chart Options

We introduced chart options — such as price type, date range, etc — in The Camelizer v2.0.  In this release, we’ve enhanced them a bit.

First of all, your chart options are now saved.  This means the price types and date range you choose will stay the same between uses of the extension.  This is useful for people who only care about used products and/or recent price changes; they no longer have to change their settings every time they use The Camelizer.

As seen in the screenshot below, we’ve also made the date range options a bit smarter by disabling those options which fall outside our available data.

Download The Camelizer v2.2

• Google Chrome: Available at the Chrome Web Store (existing users will be auto-updated, if they haven’t already)
• Mozilla Firefox: Available from our server until Mozilla reviews it (2-3 weeks, unfortunately)
• Apple Safari: Available from our server until Apple approves it (may never happen; thank you, Apple)

After a month or so of beta testing, we’ve just launched a new section of our site called Community Deals.  Here are the details on the new features, and some links to help you get started.

What is Community Deals?

Community Deals provides a way for Camel users to discover and vote on products which they think are good deals.  The products people submit to Community Deals are listed by day, with the highest-ranked products at the top of the list.  Our hope is that the most interesting deals float to the top of the list, making Community Deals a constantly evolving list of deals that will be useful and interesting to participate in and browse.

How to Use it

Adding a deal to the list is easy.  If a product is eligible — it has to be in stock and sold directly by Amazon, and the price needs to be within 5% of our lowest recorded price for the product — just click the thumbs up icon at the top of the product page and the product will appear in the Suggested Deals list.

Once a product is in that list, other users can vote on it.  If it receives enough votes, it will appear in the Latest Deals and/or Hot Deals list.  The former is a list of deals that have a minimum score, and the latter is a list of the best deals in our system.

What’s Next?

We have a lot of ideas for Community Deals.  First of all, we want to make it easier to submit products, and will be adding the thumbs up button in various places around the site; anywhere we think there’s a good deal, we’ll show the thumb.

Depending on how you use it, we may also make Suggested Deals a list which is automatically populated and provides a list of potential deals for users to up-vote.

We plan to implement these and other changes over the next few weeks / months, so expect lots of changes in the near future!  And if you’ve got any suggestions or bug reports, please contact us!  We love hearing from our users.

Try It!

Here are some links to Community Deals in each locale we support.

• United States - http://camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• United Kingdom - http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• Canada - http://ca.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• China - http://cn.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• Germany - http://de.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• Spain - http://es.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• France - http://fr.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• Italy - http://it.camelcamelcamel.com/deals
• Japan - http://jp.camelcamelcamel.com/deals