Evolution of an Amazon Detail Page
As you probably know, I put together a book called Amazon Hacks a couple years ago, and there are a couple of other books I've worked on, so I have a few reasons to watch Amazon very closely. One way that I watch Amazon is by subscribing to an Amazon RSS feed that lets me know when new books in the Hacks Series are available. On August 9th I noticed that another Hacks book I put together—Yahoo! Hacks—was available for pre-order and I posted about it. At the same time, I set up a script to take a screenshot of the Amazon detail page for Yahoo! Hacks every day at 4:10pm. I wanted to watch the page evolve, and have a record of how the page looked at various stages of development. I often think of Amazon detail pages as static, but they change quite a bit over time. Because there's no way to go back in time for individual books (unless you can go wayback on a title), there's no record of this change.
So with that in mind, here's a rough timeline of the evolution of the Yahoo! Hacks detail page I found by watching the screenshots.
August 9th [view]
So with that in mind, here's a rough timeline of the evolution of the Yahoo! Hacks detail page I found by watching the screenshots.
August 9th [view]
- Page added
- Price is at list price of $24.95
- The Editorial Review gets better formatting
- Page count jumps from 352 to 452
- Cover image added
- First Sales Rank ranking
- Related Listmania! and Guides added
- Amazon drops price to $16.47 (standard Amazon discount)
- Page count at 488 pages
- Editorial review has even better formatting with bullets
- Page count at 489 pages
- Buy button changed from "Pre-order" to "Add to Shopping Cart" (I posted about it)
- Product dimensions added
- "Better Together" offer added
- I added my own image of Yahoo! Hacks to the page with the "customer images" feature
- First customer review is added (it's good! shew.)