A Camel Thing

It has been a turbulent couple of weeks for us, but we’ve survived.  Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Amazon API Changes

Think of Amazon’s API as our data source.  They recently made some changes that effect what data is provided to users of the API.  The net result for us is simple: if Amazon has the lowest price on a product, we cannot also get the Third Party New price; otherwise, we will still be able to get the Third Party New price, and used prices aren’t affected in either scenario.  There is no published way to work around this, so it appears that we are stuck with this new API.  Fortunately, most of our users probably won’t care about third party merchants when Amazon is selling for less, but we don’t like having holes in our data!

Bringing our code up-to-date with these API changes also means that we are now able to offer support for Amazons China, Italy, and Spain.  Welcome to all of the new users who join us in those locales!

Top Drops Improvements

Due to the rapid fluctuation of prices at Amazon, our Top Drops list used to have the tendency to display products that weren’t actually worth looking at; the prices were still high, or they had jumped up and then right back down to the same price (or higher!)

These problems should now be a thing of the past.  We’ve tightened the requirements for being displays in the Top Drops by addressing the aforementioned problems of bad prices and “fake” deals.  We’re still tweaking the code as new products are updated and enter the list, but the list is already looking much more useful!

Ongoing Site Redesign

In parallel with those changes, we have been working on converting more of the site’s pages to our new style.  In this update, the product browser’s default screen and the last page of the user registration process have had the new style applied.

We also fixed a bug in the wishlist management code that was causing some page requests to fail.

That’s it for now.  Thanks to everyone who voted in our poll, you all had a lot of useful feedback!