Archive for the ‘New Price Watch Site’ Category

Tonight is the culmination of a quest we began Friday evening: to launch a new camel tracker for zZounds.com products.  Dedicated/emancipated/jubilated users, meet camelsounds.  As I mentioned, it is a tracker for music products sold by zZounds, an awesome retailer we have the pleasure of being affiliated with.  I hope the new site is useful to all the musicians and bootleggers out there.  (Which reminds me: use REAPER.)

Newegg Greasemonkey script

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Newegg and it is available here.  Don’t know what Greasemonkey is?  Read about it here.  The camelegg script works just like the camelcamelcamel script for Amazon, in that it adds price history charts and a “Track this Product” button to Newegg product pages.

A slew of other camel network-wide changes also went live with (and were the cause of much delay for) this update.

New search / product browser

The new search bar is big and huge and tries to draw your attention, and is on every page so you always know where and how to find what you’re looking for.  You can put in product URLs, retailer SKUs (ASINs on Amazon), ISBNs for books, keywords, etc.  It tries to be intelligent and works on both the Amazon/Best Buy API search pages as well as our new product browser which, incidentally, is now out of beta.

The new product browser is pretty sweet.  You can search by keywords and refine the list of products using a number of filters, such as manufacturer, category, and price range.  Site search is fully integrated into the new browser now, and all deprecated pages (like the old search page, for non-API searches) should redirect to it.

Please note that both camelcamelcamel (Amazon) and camelbuy (Best Buy) still use their “official” search engines by default.  You must go to the product browser to access functionality like price range filtering.  However, the search page for these sites has been upgraded with the product preview functionality found in the product browser.

Homepage

This is one of the changes that held up the launch of camelsounds; we spent a lot of time trying to ensure our changes actually improved the homepage.  This is contrary to my usual Zero Thought(tm) design method but I think it worked this time!

The primary change occurred in the sidebar: thumbnails in the popular and recently tracked product lists have been replaced with more detailed data.  Now the product title and price are listed alongside the thumbnail, making it easier to determine exactly which product one is looking at.

The blog links have been moved into the left side of the homepage, living either above or below the top drops table depending on your logged-in-ed-ness.

camelcamelcamel’s locale flags have been given a proper place in the menu at the top of the site.  Hopefully that makes it more obvious that we support every Amazon locale.

And finally…

That’s it!  Go to the forums and share your thoughts on these changes. Registration is optional there so you can easily post.

Tonight we launched a price tracking site for Newegg.com, one of the biggest computer hardware/software retailers around.  Honored user, meet camelegg.

It has the same features as the other camel sites, including custom price watch alerts, price history charts, RSS feeds galore…the list goes on.  We hope it will prove useful to the many brave camel riders in search of new quad-SLI video solutions.  (And maybe even the rest of us, too!)

Aside from that glorious launch, one smaller change that went live with this update was the category list under each tab of the top price drops found on the homepage of each site.  This feature lets you decide which top drops you care enough to see on the homepage, allowing you to avoid luxury watches in favor of netbooks – if you want.

It’s always a good day when a new camel is born at the farm; so good, in fact, that I’m going to post some screenshots of the work-in-progress product browser.  Enjoy!