Pricenoia shuts down
Amazon has just killed Pricenoia.
For 10 years Pricenoia has been helping Amazon customers find the best price for a product. We were the first site comparing international Amazons, with currency conversion, including shipment ..people could see price evolution, set price alerts... We even were featured by Amazon after we launched!
But it seems that lately there are too many Amazon price trackers / comparison sites, and Amazon has decided to pull the plug and kill them. Amazon decided it doesn't allow price trackers on their affiliate program... because its affiliate program is how Pricenoia and the other sites make money. So we got an email cancelling all our affiliate accounts without any possibility to discuss anything. They also wiped all the commission fees we were keeping there.
Don't get us wrong, Pricenoia has always been a side project, we started just because it was useful to us, people loved it, so we continued with it...What we earned was not much, and was used to pay the servers needed to keep track of millions of prices, updated many times a day, to give high quality information to our users.
So we can't pay for our servers, and there aren't many other real alternatives to monetize the site.
On a side note, Amazon does not allow the use of its API for price trackers, they made that clear, and has lately made it very difficult to get the data in other ways. So the quality of the information will suffer a lot, we think it won't be very useful for customers that want to keep track of prices.. So no revenues and no data.. doesn't make sense to continue.
It's a shame. If you want to keep track of international Amazon prices, you have some alternatives to Pricenoia such Camelcamelcamel, Keepa or Adquisitio. But it looks that if you are an Amazon customer, you will have fewer and fewer places to go... If you are planning to launch a site that does Amazon price tracking, well, think twice about it. But looking at the big picture, this is another confirmation that it is not a wise idea to tie yourself to a unique company ecosystem, they just have to change their criteria and you're dead.. with no right to replicate or to argue anything.
That's all.. Pricenoia has been a great experience, we started a concept, and its time for others to continue it! Thank you!
The Pricenoia team
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