PriceZombie

» see pricezombie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

PriceZombie tracked what things used to cost. Point it at a product and it would draw you the price history, so you could tell whether the sale banner in front of you was a real drop or the same number the item had been sitting at for eight months. Browser extensions put the chart directly on the retailer's own page, in Chrome and Firefox, with a Safari build as well.

The difference from everything else in the category was scope. The established tool, camelcamelcamel, tracked Amazon prices against Amazon's own history. PriceZombie crawled Amazon, Newegg, Target, IKEA, Home Depot, Fry's and more than a hundred other retailers, then merged matching products so a single chart could show you what the same item had cost in several stores over time. It was built by Peter Arremann and Jason Hamilton, two software developers working out of Tampa, Florida, under PriceZombie LLC.

That scope is exactly what killed it. Amazon's Associates program is how price trackers pay for themselves, and Amazon decided PriceZombie was not eligible for it. The founder posted the story to Hacker News in March 2016, where it took 287 points. Appeals to the associates team and to [email protected] were, in his words, either ignored or answered incompletely. In the comments he added the part that stung: a manager had told him it would not matter if they abided by the terms of service or not, because Amazon did not want PriceZombie.

What makes the case readable years later is that compliance was never the issue. He offered to stop using the API entirely and buy the data from a third party. The answer was still no.

~ the dossier ~

~ the counter on the front page ~

The homepage carried a running total of every price change the crawlers had ever recorded, and because the Archive kept capturing it, that counter is now the clearest record of the company's last year. On 18 February 2016 it read 797,049,000. By 22 February, 804,386,000.

It kept climbing after the shutdown was announced. 823,957,000 on 26 March, 825,400,000 on 2 April, 845,119,000 on 5 May, 867,112,000 on 6 June, and 909,188,000 on 3 August 2016. Nine hundred million recorded price changes is the peak figure for this product and nobody ever reported it, because the only party who knew it was the site itself, printing it in a sentence above the fold.

~ the banner that changed its mind ~

The shutdown notice did not behave like a shutdown notice. On 26 March 2016 a line across the top of the homepage reads "PriceZombie is shutting down. Read More", definite and final. By 2 April the same line reads "PriceZombie might be shutting down."

By 6 June the banner is gone altogether and the page is back to its ordinary pitch, counter still ticking. The service ran on through the summer with no notice on it at all. Whatever the founders were trying in those months, buying the data elsewhere or finding another affiliate arrangement, it bought them half a year past the obituary everyone had already read.

Then it stopped. The site serves its full product page at the 23 September 2016 capture and the tombstone by 7 October, which puts the real ending somewhere in that fortnight, six and a half months after the press had filed it.

~ the typo ~

The final page is one line, and the line has a mistake in it. The title tag reads "PriceZombie is has been shut down", with both verbs left in, as though someone started writing one sentence and finished another without rereading. That page sat at pricezombie.com into 2017 and nobody ever fixed it. The domain today serves a registrar's Coming Soon placeholder, which is at least grammatical.

~ why none of this touched me ~

This was an argument about American retail. The stores PriceZombie crawled were American stores, the affiliate program that funded it was an American program, and there was no amazon.com.tr to point it at until 2018, by which time all of this was two years finished. A price history chart is only useful where you can actually buy the thing, so for most of the world the product was a demonstration rather than a tool.

The fight it lost is the part that travels. A retailer large enough to be the market can decline to pay anyone who makes its pricing legible over time, and does not have to give a reason. Camelcamelcamel survived by never comparing Amazon to anyone else.

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