First of all: sorting is back. Please let us know what you think in the comments of this blog post.
The main benefit of the redesign of this page should be quite obvious: where we formerly had a list of price watches that could contain the same product many times in a row and often spread across multiple pages, now you should see one row per product with the individual price watches contained therein. This shortens your price watch list and makes it easier to get a global view of all price watches for each product.
Similar to our search redesign, we’ve added inline price watch creation and editing. Wherever you see a grey dash in the Desired Price column, simply click and you will be shown a box for entering your desired price; click the green check mark or hit enter on your keyboard and the price watch will be created. Editing them is done the same way: click the desired price of the price watch you want to edit, and you’ll be given a text box for editing your desired price. We hope this makes it easier to quickly manage your price watches.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had some trouble getting wishlist syncing to work reliably. This is due to the methods through which Amazon forces us to collect the items in wishlists.
Thankfully, we believe we’ve found a solution and expect wishlists to be synchronizing every other day as they used to. Sorry about the inconvenience!
Given that we regularly answer questions like, “How often does product X have its prices checked?”, we think it’s a good idea to regularly post statistics about our price checking system. This is the first post in that series.
Price Checking Frequency
This depends on a number of things, the first of which is the retailer. Newegg and Best Buy are checked every few hours, and zZounds and Backcountry are checked a couple of times per day. However, prices at these retailers don’t fluctuate that often, so we don’t always see price changes every time we check (even though we check all of the products they make available to us).
Amazon is a different story: in many cases, their prices appear to change as often as we can check them, and their product catalog is so massive that we do not have a complete copy of it. Our database is populated by users searching our site and by users of our browser extensions. Even so, we monitor the prices of about 6 million Amazon products across 9 different locales.
The vastness of Amazon’s catalog is what prompted us to publish this data in the first place. We want everyone to understand how our system works and why that means we sometimes miss price changes.
Amazon Price Checking - Product Prioritization
When checking product prices, we break products down into 9 groups based on locale — meaning the US products go in one group, UK in another, etc — and then break each of those groups down into 2 sub-groups. One (the “tracked” sub-group) contains all products which have at least one price watch, and the other (the “untracked” sub-group) contains the products with no price watches. All groups (and sub-groups) are updated in parallel, which usually means the smaller groups and sub-groups update faster than their counterparts. The lesson here is simple: if you want a product’s price checked regularly, create a price watch.
Now that you understand a little bit about how we queue products for price checking, on to the data!
Amazon Price Checking Statistics
As you can see, many of the products in our system are updated every few hours, some hourly, and some multiple times per hour. We’re working hard to improve the times of those big groups of products (US untracked, for example) and hope to bring our processing time for all Amazon products down to one day or less. Hourly updates for all Tracked products is also one of our goals.
Let us know what you think of this post in the comments. We could do more of this kind of thing if people are interested.
Just a quick reminder that you’re running out of days to place orders at Amazon if you want them to arrive by the 25th of December.
Read all about the US shipping deadlines here.
Our users in Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom are now able to access camelcamelcamel using localized domains which forward to the part of our site appropriate for your locale.
Here are the URLs:
And, to reduce the number of keystrokes needed to get to our site, all users can use 3camels.com to access our homepage; stick any locale at the beginning of that domain (ie, jp.3camels.com) and you’ll be taken to that part of our site. We recently liberated this domain from an Amazon employee (go figure!)
We are also increasing our price checking frequency in every locale, so expect to see prices change a lot more often in 2012 than they did in 2011! It’s going to be another great year at the Camel Farm.
Because we get our product data from Amazon’s API, and it does not provide prices for Lightning Deals, we are unable to show these prices on our site. In such cases, we receive and display the normal Amazon price.
Sorry for the inconvenience but this one is out of our hands.
One of the main servers in our network decided to die tonight, so we were down for about an hour while we re-installed it. No data was lost, and we were still collecting data during that time, but no web requests were served.
Also, as of a few days ago, we are again able to collect Newegg data. It must have been a temporary bug in Newegg’s system.
Sorry for the inconvenience! I hope our upcoming site updates will make it up to you all.
We aren’t sure why but, within the last couple of days, our source of Newegg data suddenly disappeared. As we have been kicked out of their affiliate program, we don’t really have a good way to find out what’s going on. However, we have heard from one brave Camel user that Newegg’s site was down yesterday, so they might just be having temporary problems…
We will post again when we find out more, and are very sorry about the inconvenience.
This morning, our database server filled up its storage and took our system down for about 10 minutes. No data was lost, but we did have to log everyone out to clear up some storage space. Everything is now back to normal and running smoothly.
Sadly, these “issue resolved” blog posts are becoming a trend. One we hope to break immediately!
This morning we had a problem with our server that processes user emails which resulted in no emails being sent. This has been resolved, and all signup and alert emails will be delivered shortly.
Sorry about that! We hope to have these kinks worked out before Black Friday!
