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I received an alert that a price target was met. I first went to the camelcamelcamel alert page, then clicked the link to go to Amazon, and was taken here:
http://www.amazon.com/Roofing-Flashin...
where I was informed that the item wasn't available at all. So I searched for the title on Amazon, and found a different product page:
http://www.amazon.com/Roofing-Flashin...
where the item is available, then clicked on the camelcamelcamel button to track the item, which took me back to the original camelcamelcamel alert page, showing my previously specified price target.
It would seem that Amazon has two distinct product pages for this item (not uncommon when 3rd party merchants add things to their catalog), but camelcamelcamel is deduping them and treating them the same on its side.
That's obviously going to lead to problems when a user clicks-though on a price alert. It also makes me wonder which of the two products camelcamelcamel is actually tracking.
Official
Response
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I have removed this feature and product links should no longer specify any merchant or offer. Once you get to Amazon, you'll have to hunt for the specific price that caused your alert, but at least this way there will be no "out of stock" confusion.
EMPLOYEE
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They are the same page. I believe the problem is that we are linking you to the specific offer that triggered the alert (say, $10 by merchant ZZZ). If someone takes advantage of that offer before you view the page, it says that offer is out of stock.
It seems poor work on Amazon's part that specifying an unavailable merchant offer would force the product to look completely out of stock, when removing only the merchant ID from the URL produces the same page but one in which the product is in stock.
Aside from increasing our price checking rate (and thus, hopefully, avoiding future situations regarding unavailable offers), the only way I can think of to fix the problem on our end is to not link to specific offers. The benefit of this feature is that you don't have to hunt for the offer that triggered your alert, but, as you've seen, this is problematic when the offer is unavailable.
What do you think -- should we just link to the product page and stop specifying the merchant offer?Comment -
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It appears that clicking the button labeled "Amazon.com product page" goes to the first link above, while clicking on "Go to Amazon" in the text, "All of your conditions have been met! Go to Amazon and buy..." leads to the second link.
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The button is "aware" of the merchant offer but apparently the link is not, so the former links to the specific offer while the latter doesnt.
It's just a question of which gets fixed! -
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> removing only the merchant ID from the URL produces
> the same page...
Ah.
> It seems poor work on Amazon's part that specifying an
> unavailable merchant offer would force the product to look
> completely out of stock...
Agreed.
> The button is "aware" of the merchant offer but apparently the
> link is not...
Ideally they should be consistent.
> should we just link to the product page and stop specifying the
> merchant offer?
That would be the easy fix.
The more involved fix would be dynamically querying Amazon and informing the user that the matching offer is no longer available.
(That could be done on your redirect page, if it can be done quickly enough. You could decrease probability of a delay by using an AJAX callback from your alert page to fetch an update when the alert page is being viewed. That way you could update the link also to point to the non-merchant page, or to a different merchant, if another one meets the criteria.
This wouldn't eliminate the problem, as there will always be a race condition due to the time it takes the user to get to Amazon after you've queried their API, even if you do it as part of the redirect. But it would reduce the chance of it happening.) -
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I don't think the redirect page is a good spot for any additional processing. Maybe I'll just nuke this feature for now to avoid further confusion, and then consider ways to fix it later on.
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I have removed this feature and product links should no longer specify any merchant or offer. Once you get to Amazon, you'll have to hunt for the specific price that caused your alert, but at least this way there will be no "out of stock" confusion.
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