"Buy it at Amazon" on old deals--is this new?
6I was clicking around on some deals of days past when I noticed this just now:
I don't remember having seen that before. Obviously Amazon's not going to be quite as cheap as Meh, but I suppose it is still useful if you find some old junk that you've got to have.
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Yeah, we've had that for a couple days now. We've been using Amazon for price comparison when the deal is live and it seemed silly to not help point people back to Amazon if they really want or need to buy the thing after we're done selling it.
This new "Buy it at Amazon" button is pretty neat in that we're doing our best to pull the current pricing information from Amazon which obviously changes from time to time.
This isn't available on all of our old deal pages yet, but we're working through them and trying to add this to all the old products that are available on Amazon.
Hope it's helpful.
@shawn Do you guys have an affiliate link that's at least making you a few pennies from directing people to Amazon?
@shawn That's the main thing I was wondering. Since Amazon's prices change all the time (like on that solar charger, which suspiciously shot up right after you all started selling it), it'd be a huge timesink if you had to manually or even semi-manually update the Amazon prices on old stuff. It's cool that you found an automatic way of scraping Amazon prices.
@Thumperchick yep, affiliate links earning us tens of dollars per day at this point. Click that button harder please.
@lljk Thankfully Amazon has an API for it called the Amazon Product Advertising API: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Product_Advertising_API
@shawn Nice revenue scraping move. 10's of bucks will fund some nice pizza lunches @ Meh.
Might it be logical to assume the Amazon link will only appear in cases where Meh has no more inventory or commitments to buy? (Future Meh repeat sales.)
@shawn Irk's salary had to come from somewhere!
@shawn Now if you only sell leftovers at Amazon undercutting the price by $1 from amazon directly... click revenue and sell for suspiciously higher prices at 12:01AM the next day!
@RedOak No, this is no way signals that we no longer have inventory remaining. For example, I'm pretty sure we're swimming in iRobot Roomba 790s (https://meh.com/deals/irobot-roomba-790-1) and we'll likely sell those again on Meh if we're unable to unload them using other channels. If anything I guess you could say it signals our stubbornness to keep Meh focused on a single daily deal.
@shawn I like the stubbornness. Sometimes similar to principles.
@RedOak i was thinking the exact same thing...
@shawn Cool beans, but I wish it said something with a little more Meh attitude, like "Deals over, but you can buy it at Amazon"
@RedOak @shawn prefers tacos...
The link from those knives a few days ago has meh in it:
http://amazon.com/dp/B00BSPAFVA?tag=meh0ec-20
@PocketBrain failed to see anything after B00BSPA
@snapster I wonder how many other "unintended consequence" product numbers they have ...
@snapster heh heh... Heh heh heh... bewbs.
Hiss boo hiss
You should line the links up in a forum thread and we can click through them. Irk needs a raise!
Personally, I hate this. I hate the fact that Amazon completely ruined woot. By linking to Amazon it makes me feel like there's some sort of secret deal to make Amazon even more money. Do I still shop there? Yeah, sometimes because it just makes sense. But when it comes to meh, fuck them. I want nothing to do with them profiting off this venture. If someone wants an item that's no longer available here, I'm sure they're capable of going to Amazon on their own or searching other sites for it. They got here didn't they?
@cinoclav Would it make you feel better if the Amazon link went to smile.amazon.com instead?
@dashcloud Nope. It would make me feel better if it said, "Sorry, no longer available. How about taking that money and contributing it to one of these charities?" With a link to a page of worthwhile charities.