"We are not allowed to show you Amazon history"?

[Rando]

What prompted this? Fill me in if I missed something :).

EDIT: Camelcamelcamel can still show Amazon price history, so a bit befuddled here.

[tomas3333]

Well, Amazon contacted me that I'm violating Operating Agreement because they considered price history to be cacheing price for more than 24 hours. I'm trying to deal with them to get the history back.

[Cleveland]

The fuck is it any business of Amazon's if you track the price history? You can tell them to go suck a fat one.

[L0ki]

I would be interested to know what the legality of this is either way. I mean, do they really have any legal right to compel you not to list their price history? However, just knowing that Amazon doesn't want you to do this will make me less likely to purchase from them in the future. Anti-consumer behavior pisses me off.

Edit: If this is related to API access couldn't you just manually scrape prices off the site instead and hammer their server? Or is this more related to not wanting to bite the hand that feeds you so to speak related to the funding you can get through referral links?

[zelgaris]

Hi L0ki,
as we depend on retailers with affiliate programs to run the site without ads, and Amazon being one of them, yes, we are following their rules so we can use API and their affiliate program.
As Tomas said, we are also trying to get the history back, though we noticed we aren't the only site being affected by this.
As for ignoring their API and doing it the hard way - that could be possible I guess but really not preferable.

And we also understand anybody not wanting to buy from Amazon anymore (as some already told us), but to be fair, if the game is available anywhere else (and I have yet to randomly find a game which is available only at Amazon), you can always check the game info on ITAD to compare the price to other retailers.

[Piotrek, Engineer of Design]

If it's not, it should be illegal for them to forbid you from showing price history. This is restricting access to information, and it's probably supposed to benefit them from shady sales (increasing the base price just before a sale, so that the "X % off" is higher).

[Shawnecy]

What's the difference between ITAD and camelcamelcamel (https://camelcamelcamel.com)?

[Rando]

Originally posted by Shawnecy:

What's the difference between ITAD and camelcamelcamel (https://camelcamelcamel.com)?

camelcamelcamel only shows Amazon history; it doesn't show other sites.

[zelgaris]

Guys, let's just drop this already.
We decided to follow their rules to stay in their affiliate program, because that's how we are able to actually run the site (without any ads).
And if you look on the issue from the usability point of view, not having their price history isn't that big of a deal, unless the game is sold only on Amazon - and most games aren't - so you always have other stores to compare the price to.

[Qba`th'Invinc!ble]

Is Amazon's affiliate income still worth not scraping data to show price history?