Lately I’ve been coding something new! It’s called camelcamelcamel and it is for tracking the pricing and availability of products on Amazon.com. The user simply finds a product in which she is interested and enters the price point at which she would like to receive an alert. The site constantly monitors Amazon’s product data and emails the user the moment changes are detected.

c3 (brilliant shorthand, don’t you think?) is mainly–second to the love–an experiment in utilizing the Associates Web Service (AWS), but there are some underlying possible data sets that could prove interesting. For example, one could easily determine what price people are willing to pay for the latest iPod; this could help set the price of future products or the discounts in the next sale. It is also interesting to watch the price of products prior to becoming, during, and after being a Deal of the Day or Goldbox promotion; do prices jump right before, to justify the huge savings during the sale? And where do said prices end up when the sale is over?

These questions and more will be answered in due time. The database needs time to expand, to gorge, to imbibe. To this end, I am doing some eager tracking: the Goldbox and Deal of the Day (as well as many categories’ worth of the Best-seller, Most Wished For, and New Releases) data feeds are being imported regularly, so that the site can provide users with plenty of historical data on the most popular products.

Check it out at http://camelcamelcamel.com. I appreciate any feedback you care to give. =)

(Thus begins the countdown – how long until I kick myself for not using PHP?)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.