More than three years ago, we embarked on a massive project to provide users with not just another Amazon price tracking website, but also a comparison engine that allows price comparisons between various retailers like BestBuy, HomeDepot, Target, and Amazon. In that time we have grown from zero to over 150K monthly visitors on our website and more than 60K active users of our browser extensions - all free of charge to our users. Our robot also operates in thousands of subreddits, providing pricing information visible to millions of users on Reddit.

 

Unfortunately, it seems our service has to come to an untimely end.

 

After being previously told we were in 100% compliance with the rules, our Amazon affiliate account was closed a few months ago. Amazon claimed we were violating their rules against showing product and price information that was more than 24 hours old. Obviously, this is something ALL price history trackers do, not just PriceZombie.

 

Overnight, we lost over 90% of our income but we kept going, hoping to resolve any issues and return to compliance. However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening. This situation is further compounded by our competitors (who only index Amazon) being allowed to continue despite utilizing Amazon's data in the same manner as we did without facing similar bans. As you can imagine, being dealt with so unfairly and arbitrarily is very frustrating but in the end, the one that really suffers is you: our loyal user.

 

With the server and bandwidth costs mounting, we are planning to discontinue our service on 3/31/2016.

 

If there are any investors out there who might be interested in PriceZombie - either the company or the technology - please contact us at support@pricezombie.com

 

Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with other stores, please contact us at support@pricezombie.com

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Newegg and a small number of other stores we support asked us not to use their product data in our browser extension.

Until this situation is sorted out, we have deactivated them in our extension, but will continue supporting them on our website.

Meanwhile you can still cut and paste those store's urls into the PriceZombie search box on our website for quick access to product price history (look for the magnifying glass icon on the top of the site).

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Hope everyone is having a great thanksgiving today. Just wanted to make a small note that we've corrected a long standing issue with cookies. One of our observant users noticed that the PriceZombie cookie was set to "session", meaning as soon as you close your browser, the session vanished.

That has been fixed - the cookie length is now set for a long timeframe, meaning those of you who frequently restart your browser, won't have to login repeatedly anymore.

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Its been a while since I last posted. Here are a few recent articles talking about PriceZombie:

NBC's Today.com plugging PriceZombie

Techlicious recommending PriceZombie

The Gadget Show recommended PriceZombie in episode 9 of this season

and... CNET plugging Pricezombie!

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Woohoo! PriceZombie is now a featured Firefox browser extension.



Click to read more.

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We've been working on a longer term project for PriceZombie that won't be available for a few more months.

Without going into boring detail: Its basically a complex systems of algorithms that will spot price trends using our historical data, and use that information to locate price drops.

Currently all systems (including PriceZombie) function by blindly polling external systems for price changes. The only way to be better than the competition when blindly polling, is to poll more frequently. Stores like Amazon have throttle limits in place that prevent asking for updates too frequently. Typically this means a window of 1-36 hours between product updates (depending on factors like sales rank, out of stock, how many people have the product in the watchlist, page views, etc). That's a lot of time for price changes to occur. Especially if you consider a particularly good price drop will result with the product going out of stock.

What this change means for you: PriceZombie will alert you to price drops much faster than any of our competitors, possibly by a massive margin. We won't know till we've completed refining the algorithms, but its already showing improvements over the exiting system.

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Read article

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PriceZombie can now tell you when items go out of stock. OOS points are drawn with a dotted line.

If multiple out of stock points happen next to an in stock price, you may see multiple dotted lines in a row. This functions on both the website and browser extensions.

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Mozilla store has approved our bugfix! So if you have firefox 39+ and are still on version 2.0.0.1, please upgrade to 2.0.1 if it isn't working for you.

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Queue Position: 135 of 135

We're at the end of the review list.. soon as someone reviews and approves it, it'll become available.

Sorry, I have no way to speed it up.

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