Our Top Price Drops list is now being updated every 30 minutes rather than a few times per day, and should no longer show that “we are regenerating the Top Drops” message while updating.
I think I speak for every Camel user when I say, it’s about time!
Our pricing data has outgrown the code that generates our Top Drops list. Unfortunately, this means that the Top Drops are going to be offline until we get the new code ready. We’re actually testing some new ideas right now, so hopefully it won’t be too long before the Top Drops are back.
Sorry about the inconvenience. The homepage sure looks sad =/
Amazon gave us little noticeable warning before doing some testing of their API (the source of our product and pricing data) today. While we had previously worked around the issues we knew it would cause, parts of the site weren’t yet up-to-date and so some products may have pricing errors, with the most likely error being that Amazon prices will be displayed as “out of stock” when they are actually in stock.
These issues should resolve themselves as our system updates the products again. Sorry about the inconvenience! Hopefully they give us a bit more warning next time…
We’ve been continuing with our plan to redesign the key pages of our site and, so far, progress has been great. Last night we launched two new designs: the product page, and the search results page(s); both of which were designed by Ryan Reed. Thanks Ryan!
The Product Page
Last November, we launched a drastic redesign of most of our site. This effort began with the simplification of the product page and quickly expanded outward. While we accomplished our goal of simplification, the product page fell short in terms of ease of use: more than once, I heard complaints that people couldn’t figure out how to use parts of the page, or didn’t know a feature even existed. It truly made the camels weep.
11 months later, we’ve taken hints from our old design and combined them with current and new ideas to create a product page that is much easier to use. Tabs have replaced easy-to-miss links as the main navigation method; chart options like date range are on the right side of the chart rather than surrounding it, and have been enhanced — a slider for the date range and toggle buttons for everything else — to make their use more obvious.
With this design, we’ve captured the best of our previous product page designs and merged them into something better than the sum of its parts. Here’s an example page you can use to view the changes.
Search
Compared to the product page, our search page has less history behind it, and its design has actually remained fairly consistent throughout the site’s existence. That ends with this update, however.
The page has been given a nicer header that matches with the shared theme of our updated design; we’ve streamlined everything from the search box down to take up less space; and the sorting and filtering options should also be more visible.
In the search results proper, we’ve reorganized the price types for each product and matched them up with the colors we use to draw each in our price history charts. Further, when you’re logged in, the cute but cryptic camel icons have been replaced with checkmarks that indicate when you’re already tracking a product.
Lastly, both the local and API-based search pages now share a unified design, whereas they used to be somewhat different. You can move back and forth between the two search types using links above the search box on each page.
What do you think?!
We really want to know. We’re making this site for you, after all. So please leave your comments here on the blog or head over to our forum and post in the thread I’ve created.
Thanks to Joe from joe.to for his feedback. His ideas took our redesign from good to great!
This summer, our affiliate account with Newegg — which pays us when you buy products using links on our site — was terminated because we inadvertently broke one of their rules. After fixing the problem, I emailed the affiliate manager at Newegg and begged to be reconsidered for their program. This request (and a couple that followed) was initially met with silence, but today he responded and said that we will not be allowed back into their affiliate program.
What very important rule did we break? Our Twitter account had the word “newegg” in it. That’s it! And after renaming the account to the much less informative @cameleggtopdrop, Newegg refuses to budge.
As this is basically the only source of income from the site, we are turning to our users to help us get back into the affiliate program. So, if you care at all about the service camelegg provides, please let Newegg know! Here’s the contact info in case you feel like sending an email: affiliates@newegg.com.
Mentioning how much more you feel like shopping at Newegg after using our site and/or receiving our price drop alerts might go a long way toward convincing them to change their mind. Be sure to mention camelegg, rather than camelcamelcamel, as the site in question.
Thank you for your efforts. And time spent reading this.
After upgrading our blog setup, I found out that the theme I had chosen didn’t support user comments. So I looked around tonight and found one that does, and now you can share your thoughts with us like you used to.
Woohoo!
For a couple of reasons, including making sure the blog is available when our network is down, we have switched to using Tumblr. It seems like a decent enough platform, and all of our old posts have been transferred over.
Those Camel users with a watchful eye might have noticed that we haven’t posted anything to our blog regarding site updates in quite a while…fortunately (for our developer shame/guilt) there were actually some updates this summer and we got behind on posting about them, so this post contains details on all of the changes we made during Summer 2011.
This is a feature that has been on our to-do list for way too long. The basic idea behind wishlist synchronization is that some users would rather manage their price watches by keeping their Amazon (or other retailer) wishlist up-to-date. Instead of creating price watches for your wishlist once and then finishing, our system now keeps track of your wishlist and updates it regularly. Items you’ve purchased are marked so that you will no longer receive price drop alerts about them, and new products on your wishlist are added to your Camel account as price watches. To access your wishlists page, login and go to http://camelcamelcamel.com/wishlists.
We have finally joined the rest of the Internet and added the ability to sign up and login to our sites via your account(s) at Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google. You can also tie any number of your social accounts to your existing Camel account, allowing you to login with any of your social accounts. Our login and sign up pages have also received a small redesign as the first step in a larger project of improving many pages in our site. You may have noticed some extra links in our page headers recently; those breadcrumbs should make navigating around the site easier. And finally, we’ve finally made it possible to login using your email address as your username. This has been the source of much confusion in the past, so this should make the site work better for more people.
Based on the way our users interact with the price history charts in the product page, we’ve made a couple of changes to their default settings. First, the timeline option now defaults to “all”, giving you a full view of our historical data. Then, we made the primary price type from each retailer the only price type in the chart. This means that, in Amazon’s case, the “Amazon price” is by default the only line in the chart. Our statistics indicate these options are those most often chosen by our users, so we hope they will make your use of our site more efficient. Fewer clicks = better!
A lot of our recent efforts have been focused on reducing page loading times. We’ve implemented better caching control on files like images, and moved such files onto region-specific servers, something we hope will reduce download times for users in Europe and Asia. The amount of javascript we use has also been reduced, further improving download times. The top drops on the homepage now load in the background after the homepage has loaded, leading to less wait on your initial load of our site.
We’re already at work on more changes. Search and some other key pages are getting the same design treatment that the login and signup pages have already received. We also want to get the “products at their lowest prices ever” page out the door before soon, as we promised it early and now it has been a while. If you find any problems with the updated site, please let us know. You will be doing us a great favor.
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