Introducing Amazon.com Price Drops

Price DropIn my “spare time” I coded up something that I thought would be of interest for all the PseudoSavant readers out there; I am calling it Amazon.com Price Drops (see widget in the sidebar). Basically, my server continually tracks the change in prices at Amazon.com to find the products that have had a significant price drop recently, like a PC-free cordless Skype phone (25% price drop), a Garmin GPS unit (15% price drop), or a Pioneer 1080p upscaling DVD player (13% price drop).

It’s always nice to find products that are marked down off the list price, but most products online are already discounted. How do you know if it is an especially good deal? The idea is for this price drop listing to inform you of products that were recently selling online for a significantly higher price. The top price drops are in the sidebar on the right. Also, you can view the full list by clicking on this link or the “More Price Drops” link at the bottom of the sidebar widget.

For now I’ve limited the price drop listing to certain categories that seem most relevant to readers of PseudoSavant (i.e., consumer electronics and computers). But that could change if I hear of any interest for this kind of service for other types of products. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Filed In: Tech Stories
February 18, 2008

Comments

13 Responses to “Introducing Amazon.com Price Drops”

  1. Bob Caswell on February 18th, 2008 5:20 pm

    As I’ve mentioned before, Amazon is where I do most of my online shopping anyway. So it’s nice to have this kind of information available.

  2. Paul Ellis on February 18th, 2008 6:00 pm

    That’s why I did it with Amazon first. They sell almost anything, usually for a very good price.

  3. Tyler Reber on February 18th, 2008 6:33 pm

    I saw this when I checked the site this morning and was wondering if there was gonna be a ‘press release’. Very cool feature!

  4. Kevin M. Keating on February 19th, 2008 5:52 pm

    Very cool. Nice work.

  5. Mike on March 18th, 2008 4:18 pm

    Here is another site I usually use. It works very well.
    http://www.nukeprice.com

  6. Yan on May 22nd, 2008 11:06 pm

    This is very cool. I think you should include images in the widget

  7. Paul Ellis on May 23rd, 2008 4:03 pm

    Glad you like it Yan. I’ll have to see how I could possibly incorporate images into the widget. If you click “More Price Drops…” it does show the whole list (not just the top 7) with images.

  8. Amod on May 26th, 2008 9:09 pm

    Is your app able to get price drops on items where amazon list price is not displayed and you have to “Click here to see price”? Thank you.

  9. Paul Ellis on May 27th, 2008 1:38 am

    Amod,

    I’m pretty sure it does. It pulls the prices down via RSS, and I believe (~98% sure) those prices are included. IIRC, they use some HTML/CSS/Javascript to obscure the price so you have to click on something. However if you are parsing the code, it doesn’t care that some piece of content shouldn’t be shown, because the price is still visible in the HTML.

  10. NukePrice on June 14th, 2008 12:37 am

    Check the Best Amazon Price Watch Site:
    http://www.nukeprice.com

  11. Raj on June 24th, 2008 11:21 am

    Are you keeping track of all the price drop(s) using amazon web services? I would be interested in knowing more about the actual code and architecture you are using considering amazon has millions of items listed. Thank you for great work.

  12. Paul Ellis on June 24th, 2008 12:15 pm

    I actually only track the top 100 bestsellers in a variety of categories. My implementation is all PHP/MySQL and uses their RSS feeds. I have though about switching over to AWS though. It wouldn’t be hard, but I’d just have to find the time, and it works fine right now.

    I have our server pull down data on a couple of thousand best selling products multiple times each day and put it in a database. Then the database is analyzed to find any products whose price has dropped over the last two weeks to a month. I create a new table with that data and sort by smallest to largest (largest discount to smallest).

    For the widget on the homepage I exclude cellphones from being shown because their pricing structure (tons of phones are deeply discounted from their “retail” price) made them dominate the list.

  13. Raj on June 24th, 2008 3:30 pm

    It may be too much to ask but would you mind to share the source code and db structure?

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