When I first started selling on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel was a must-have tool. Although it was created with Amazon.com buyers in mind, Amazon sellers quickly realized it had a lot of potential for their businesses.
We used it to find Amazon to Amazon flips, predict future sales price, and do our best to avoid the dreaded race to the bottom.
The popular website Lifehacker ranked it as the top Amazon price tracker in 2015, and the website was absolutely booming at the time with no sign of slowing down.
Flash forward to today, and CamelCamelCamel is hardly even mentioned in the Amazon selling space.
Here's why...
CamelCamelCamel will be abbreviated throughout the rest of this article as CCC for my sanity and yours.
Reason #1 Amazon Affiliate Crackdown
In 2020, Amazon started aggressively targeting price tracking tools that were using their affiliate program. Several CCC alternatives shut down completely. Among them were tools I used as I was coming up in the space like PriceZombie and TheTracktor.com.
Although they didn't lose their affiliate account somehow, Amazon told CCC to stop tracking their items during Covid. This seems to have put them behind the 8 ball and caused them to lose ground to Keepa, who could continue tracking throughout.
Also, Amazon dramatically cut their commission rates for their affiliates in April 2020, which certainly cut into CCCs revenue and ability to reinvest in their program to keep up with Keepa.
Let's talk more about Keepa...
Reason #2 Keepa
Keepa is CCC on steroids and without the Amazon affiliate baggage.
Keepa monetizes differently from most Amazon price trackers. They don't use the Amazon associates program (which is the Amazon affiliate program). Instead, they monetize with a paid monthly plan and an API that charges for usage.
It allows them to bypass the restrictions Amazon puts on companies who are trying to not lose their Amazon associate account privileges.
Keepa has clearly grown inversely as CCC has lost market share.
Compared to CCC, Keepa has...
- Far more data points
- Supports more marketplaces
- Supports multiple currencies
- Has far more features
- Better user interface and experience
The only reason an Amazon seller would use CCC and not Keepa is if they didn't know about Keepa and its potential uses.
Reason #3 2019 Disk Failure
CCC had a catastrophic loss of data that hurt their growth tremendously and at the worst time possible (right before COVID).
A huge part of the value of a price tracker is its data history, and this was a huge blow to CCC and their ability to maintain their position as the most useful Amazon price tracker when compared to services like Keepa, who have consistent, uninterrupted data for many years in a row.
Based on the Chrome stores public data about installations, CCCs Chrome extension The Camelizer still has a healthy number of users.
It still pails compared to Keepa.
How about you? Do you still use CCC? Let me know in the comments.
Good insight