A Camel Thing

Refurbished Kindles for $49, Today Only!

camelytics — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:16:31 -0700

Amazon Local is running a deal today that gives you a Certified Refurbished Kindle for $49. The only downside (for some people) is that it is the ad-supported model, but apparently you can upgrade away from that for an additional fee and get rid of the ads.

This seems like a great deal for anyone who wants to try the Kindle. I love mine and use it literally every day. Cosmic Shovel-er Ben picked up one of these and he was very excited to share the news. Thanks for the tip, Ben!

Check out the deal at Amazon Local.

Downtime Cancelled

camelytics — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:20:00 -0700

Our building’s power maintenance was cancelled for a second time. There will be no downtime. Sorry to disappoint!

Database Maintenance Complete!

camelytics — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:08:00 -0700

It was a long wait but finally our database maintenance is done and we have resumed data collection. We hope we haven’t lost your faith during this time; we did our best to keep everything running but, in the end, we had to turn data collection off for a week or so. That was really painful for us but we had no choice.

Thanks for weathering that storm with us. Happy cameling!

Update

Top Drops will be updated after our system has had a chance to catch up on all of its products.

A Note About Reduced Capacity

camelytics — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:59:00 -0700

Due to our server maintenance taking longer than anticipated, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to temporarily slow down our product pricing checks. This will only last until the maintenance is complete — the current ETA is a little over 4 days — and then we’ll be back to normal.

Our Top Drops list will also not be updated during this time.

We are very sorry if you miss any deals during this time.

Upcoming Server Maintenance - Read This (Again)!

camelytics — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:04:00 -0700

We will be taking our sites offline to do some database server maintenance in the next week or so. Unfortunately, it is a big one and will take a number of hours to complete. We are hopeful that we can keep the sites up for most of that window, but we may run into problems and be forced to be completely offline until maintenance is complete.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this is sure to cause, but we really cannot avoid this maintenance. The best explanation is: We’re collecting so much data that we have to expand the database or we risk it filling up. Due to the size of our existing data, this expansion will take hours.

Consider yourselves warned!

2012-03-27

Maintenance took longer than expected tonight. Or, more accurately, pre-maintenance backups took longer than expected. This is the first downtime in what we hope will be a small series of necessary downtimes. The upside is, after we get things straightened out, we should have smooth sailing for a while.

Expect another late-night (for US folks) downtime in the next day or two.

2012-03-28

We’ve found a way to update our database without taking it offline, and have been utilizing this method since around 9pm this evening. Right now, the estimated run-time is about 3 days…during which time, the site will be slower to respond to requests and we will be updating fewer products per hour. Once the maintenance is complete, things will go right back to normal. Or perhaps even better!

Product Page Changes, Camelizer for Safari, and Other Hot Newness

camelytics — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:27:00 -0800

It’s been a while since our last update, but we’ve not been slacking…here’s the lowdown on our latest set of changes, which were launched earlier today.

Product Page

Continuing our planned layout / design updates, we have moved the content of the Price Watches tab on the product page and moved it up above the tabs. This makes it easier to create and view your price watches, and to view our historical pricing and other relevant data while doing so.

During its extraction from the tab structure of the product page, we also redesigned the price watch management interface. The text is less dense and the options are more streamlined, which we hope will allow for faster price watching. The Example Prices table has been moved to an in-page popup; just roll your mouse over the price tag icon next to the desired price box and you should see the example prices.

“Price When Tracked” is Back!

After a lot of user complaints since we launched the new Price Watches listing page, we have brought the Price When Tracked information back to your price watches list. And, to make it easy to visually scan, the prices are underlined in colors that match their price type.

This feature shows the price of the product at the time your price watch was created. This is useful for comparing to the current price, to see how prices have (or haven’t) changed.

Wishlist Synchronization

We have made an important change to our wishlist synchronization code: it will no longer recreate deleted price watches! Initially, we assumed that users would be managing their price watches from their wishlists, so we made our code recreate price watches that were deleted via our site. It turns out that our users didn’t want it to work this way, so we changed it and now deleted price watches should stay deleted. Sorry about the confusion and frustration this caused.

Camelizer for Safari

Recently, a surfer from New Zealand stayed with Dan for a few weeks. He ended up being a coder as well, and decided to try porting our Chrome browser extension to Safari. The result was an extension that works with current versions of Safari, and works quite well at that!

Download the beta version of the Camelizer for Safari here. Please note that it probably contains bugs, but the basic functionality should work.

Site Issues Resolving...

camelytics — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:58:13 -0800

After our maintenance last night, our search engine mysteriously failed to come online. This caused errors all around the site: product search, bulk price watch editing, etc.

We are working to resolve this problem and it should be fixed within the hour. Sorry for the inconvenience! We know that this probably hurt our European users the most, so additional apologies to them.

We've Upgraded the "Your Price Watches" Page

camelytics — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:46:00 -0800

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.

Wishlist Synchronization Fixed

camelytics — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:02:16 -0800

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!

How Our Price Checking System Works

camelytics — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:53:00 -0800

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.

Amazon's Holiday Shipping Deadlines

camelytics — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 03:06:00 -0800

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. In the UK? Here’s your link.

Good News for Our Amazon Users!

camelytics — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:00:00 -0800

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.

Amazon's Lightning Deals

camelytics — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:47:38 -0800

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.

We're Back Online!

camelytics — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:43:53 -0800

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.

Newegg Data is Unavailable

camelytics — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:49:00 -0800

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.

Database Issue Resolved

camelytics — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 09:10:45 -0800

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!

Email Issues Resolved

camelytics — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:44:32 -0800

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!

Sessions Problems Fixed!

camelytics — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:49:45 -0800

You’ll have to clear your cookies, but otherwise things should be back to normal as far as staying logged in across our various Amazon locales goes. Please comment on this post if you have cleared your cookies and are still being logged out when changing locales.

User Sessions are Acting Strange

camelytics — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:34:46 -0800

Before I go to bed, I want to let everyone know that there is a known bug in our site’s session system which has two side effects: 1) if you login in one locale, you won’t stay logged in when navigating to another locale; 2) login sessions expire much more rapidly than usual. Nothing major, just little annoyances.

Please keep this in mind when using the site in the next 12 or so hours, and I will do my best to fix these problems when I wake up!

Bug Fixes for our Amazon Locales

camelytics — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:33:16 -0800

We launched some wishlist synchronization bugfixes for the new Amazon locales (China, Italy, Spain.) We also fixed some product URL detection bugs in our search code.

Users in the new locales should now be able to sync their wishlists. And all users will (or should, anyway) appreciate our search engine correctly detecting and parsing product URLs. Hooray for working Camels!