Feeds are coming out of beta…
They have been working reliably for over a week now, time to take them out of beta… and add some more.
For the time being there are 3 feeds that automatically get picked up by the site.
Amazon Today’s Deals – stuff from Amazon’s Today’s Deals section. All Lightning Deals, Best Deals, and Deal of the Day (aka what Amazon considers sales) always end up in this section. Updates every hour, about 10 past the hour. Default view is by latest added, but can be sorted by price and percentage drop (makes it easy to flush out all those high % Overstock deals).
amzADfilament – first 5 pages of the search results for 1kg filament on Amazon’s All Discount section, sorted by price. Auto calculates price after coupon (if there is one on the page), but does not have the ability to see and account for promos on page (BOGO, etc). Updates every 2 hours.
amzKPfilament – first 100 results from a Keepa feed, based on percentage drop over 30 day mean. Currently set at 10% to allow as many listings as possible (to help with testing), but will be dialed back to 20% during the next fine-tuning. Does not have the ability to understand coupons (capable, but a pain to get working right, so will have to wait), and can be a bit behind on prices.
When Amazon returns search results it’s always one item (asin) per listing. So a listing that may have 50 different colors of PLA and PETG will be represented by one item. That item is not always the best deal at the listing. It is the best price, but that doesn’t make it the best deal. Think of a scenario where 1kg of PLA is $12, but a 2 pack at the same listing is $16. The two pack is a much better deal, but Amazon will return only one item – the lowest priced item, which in this case will be 1kg.
Keepa doesn’t have that limitation, and will display multiple items per listing. Since the feed is based on the percentage drop, rather than price, it should (doesn’t always, but should) be able to expose that “sweet spot” item that Amazon feed misses. This feed has a bunch of it’s own limitations, some already mentioned, others can take all day to list. Which is why the Amazon and Keepa feeds are meant to be used together.
Over the next few days the two filament feeds will start appearing in the main filament section of the site. There are some formatting/layout issues i need to play with before it can happen, so i’m pushing this off until the weekend. I already missed the last AliEx sale entirely while getting these to work, i don’t want to miss the one that’s live now, since there is a good chance it’s the only sale we’ll have this May.
So, for now…. while i’m focusing on the AliEx sale.
If looking for filament from Amazon, make sure to check out the feeds first. Feeds update every 2 hours, alternating by the hour, so there is always something “fresh” there. Sort by price, or percentage drop…. have fun 🙂
