set used and third party price alerts for Amazon items in one place

Edit Subject

I'm not sure I agree that if you track one price type, you automatically want to track all of them.

I do agree that the current scheme is sub-optimal, though. As I've mentioned recently (here or in our forum), I plan to add an "advanced price watch" creation page that will address issues like this.

That wouldn't solve the problem of the product list's size, but that is probably its own issue. Maybe the list should be a list of products rather than a list of price watches? But that might make it harder to scan for price information...

> I'm not sure I agree that if you track one price type, you
> automatically want to track all of them.

Correct. On some items I track all 3, some used only (mostly books), and some Amazon and new 3rd party. The point is that on many, I'm tracking more than one source.

> Maybe the list should be a list of products rather than a list of
> price watches?

I've used other price tracking sites that support multiple merchants, and they similarly require that you set alerts for each merchant. This always felt inefficient.

The ideal situation is normalizing products and prices so one alert can apply to any vendor. The only immediate use case that comes to mind for why a user wouldn't want this, is if you wanted to set vendor-specific price thresholds to adjust for shipping costs. (This accounts for all the differences in the thresholds I set for Amazon vs. new 3rd party vendors.) Obviously incorporating shipping costs would eliminate that need.

Well, the other obvious use case is when there are quality differences in the product, such as new vs. used, but that is arguable a product attribute, rather than a vendor variation. And from that perspective it supports your current implementation for using separate items to track new and used Amazon prices with separate items. (Though that doesn't support separating Amazon and 3rd party new vendors.) A way to address this is to provide checkboxes for conditions to consider, so if the user wants to set a lower threshold for used items, they use a separate item and select only used for the condition.

For other odd cases where you wanted alerts to be vendor specific, you could always support a vendor filter option for power users.

> But that might make it harder to scan for price information...

How so? If I want to find the best deal on product X, is it better to see 3 items with slightly different prices, or one item showing the bottom line current price? Sure, the details should be there if I click-through, but the objective here (for most users) is to spot deals, not analyze a particular vendors pricing trends.

Like I mentioned in your other post, we put each merchant on its own site because the retailers want that. Now that the Shopzilla data is available to us, we could easily make the Camel code work with that data, and I imagine that would include creating one price watch for each product. It would essentially work just as camelcamelcamel works now, sifting through different merchant offers for each product and finding the lowest price; in the case of Shopzilla, each offer is a retailer.

Now, if by "different merchants" you mean 3rd party new/used on Amazon's site, they are separated because a used product isn't the same as a new product, and people usually want to track them separately. That is my assumption, anyway. We do allow you to create all of these price watches simultaneously (by checking which price types you'd like to track), but it does create more than one.

Maybe merging these price watches, in the tracking list as you've suggested, is then a good way to "flatten" the list. There would still be three price watches running, but your list would only show one product.

Is that what you're getting at? I'm told that I may have misunderstood your last reply...

Are the 3 checkboxes to select Amazon, Merchant, and Used new? That seems to work well.

Only if you registered since checking it last, as unregistered users still see radio buttons. Otherwise that feature has been available for some time now.

I use ccc to wait for an CD to drop below $5 in very good or better condition. That's it. That's all my amazon wishlist was for too. Naturally, if a product sells new for $5, that's even better.

Having a way to bulk edit used prices would REALLY change things for me, but if that were to happen this would be a nice bonus.

We're currently looking at improving the way you manage your tracked products, and hope to have something out in the near future.

Thanks for reminding us to keep at it!

There is a fundamental flaw with the site: Price watches should be based on PRODUCTS, not ASINs.

I use CCC to track the price of music. Right now, I'm required to add at least 4 price watches (one for Amazon.com MP3, and three for each condition of the physical CD). The acceptable price for the product is the same (all-inclusive, including shipping), but because different products have different shipping costs, each ASIN needs its own price. In other words, the Amazon.com MP3 price can be slightly higher than the physical CD price (in any condition) and still meet $5 goal because this product has no shipping costs.

In other words, I want to set ONE price watch that tracks the following and alerts me when ANY of them fall below $5 all-inclusive, because these are all the same to me. Once the price watch is met, and I purchase the item (or decide I no longer want it or whatever), I want to delete the price watch and have ALL of these go away.

- Amazon.com price for B0013DACUQ @ $5 (MP3)
- Amazon.com price for B000Y14U4M @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd party new for B000Y14U4M @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd part used for B000Y14U4M @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- Amazon.com price for B001EOQUWI @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd party new for B001EOQUWI @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd part used for B001EOQUWI @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- Amazon.com price for B0014W8TNS @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd party new for B0014W8TNS @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd part used for B0014W8TNS @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- Amazon.com price for B001GSAIMU @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd party new for B001GSAIMU @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)
- 3rd part used for B001GSAIMU @ $2.02 (CD, $5 - $2.98 shipping)

While you can submit the "new price watch" form once to create up to three price watches (one per price type), we currently have no way to match products across ASINs.

That would be doable, with a non-trivial amount of effort, but I wonder how many people equate MP3s with CDs. When I'm in the market for a new album, if I'm paying for it, I want something physical (and usually unused.) I imagine people fall on both sides of this argument...

We (the Camel team) have discussed it and we feel that it's a good idea but has too limited an audience to invest time into right now.

Yeah, the use case of mutli-ASIN is limited when Amazon.com is the only web site you support (the use case becomes more clear when you can track the same product across multiple web sites).

Okay, instead, can we at least group all prices watches for the same ASIN? I don't want to see the same ASIN three times in my list. When I'm viewing the "Your Price Watches" list, show each ASIN once with the price watch that has the minimum difference. Clicking on a product should show me all (one, two, or three) price watches in effect for that ASIN and their respective differences all on one page.

Update: I guess this is similar to the More efficient price watch page idea. That would work too.

We actually already have such changes planned. Here's a screenshot:



The price watches list is probably going to be next on our list of pages to update, after we launch the new product and search pages this weekend.