I ran across an interesting problem with Amazon ECS (the API provided by Amazon for helping them sell their products) today. It seems that they have (suddenly?) decided that certain products are too good for ECS and that data on such products will not be available. If you try to use ItemLookup to find the Wii Fit, for example, you get the following result:
<Error>
<Code>AWS.ECommerceService.ItemNotAccessible</Code>
<Message>This item is not accessible through ECS.</Message>
</Error>
Same thing for the Wii and likely countless other Awesome Products.
This, to me, seems indicative of two things. One, Amazon is continuing its long slow march to the shithouse. And two, Amazon is trying to force websites like camelcamelcamel to scrape their site instead of, you know, using the API like one is supposed to.
A constant tightening of the rules by Amazon is likely to have one result - the end of the Amazon Associates program and, with it, the beginning of the end for Amazon itself.