Confirmation for Price Alerts

[thetrial]

I would like to receive a confirmation e-mail for Price Alerts where the product and price are sent pack to the user for future reference. Also, there might be, but I have been unable to find a way to unsubscribe from Price Alerts.

[mary]

Thank you for your interesting suggestions! I will pass them on to the site Administrator.

[stephen]

Nice Kafka reference :)

Surely I'm missing some subtlety in your feature request. I believe that the current format of Price Alerts sends you the product and price, such as:

Make: Canon
Model: 8068A008
Description: Canon, EOS-1DS, Digital Camera, Digital Pro SLR, 11.1 Megapixels
Best Price: 5799.00

Is there another flavor of product & price you would like to see in the report?

Also, you bring up a good point on how to clear no longer wanted Price Alerts from the event queue. The story here goes back to 1998, an era when the signal-to-noise ratio in our inboxes was fantastic. That was also the year that StreetPrices came up with the industry's first product price alert agent (within four months copied by shopper.com and now in wide spread use).

Also back in those days, product prices routinely mirrored Moore's law falling at an annualized rate of 40% (equivalent to halving every 18 months).

Combining these two factors, our Email Alert system was built to keep the signal:noise ratio high, i.e. minimize the amount of email a user receives and make sure that it is relevant. To that end, each Price Alert request was designed to be fulfilled exactly once. That is to say that it is not a subscription, but rather a non-reoccurring event queue. And since in those dot-com hay days prices were falling rapidly, it was assumed that it was just a matter of months before any given request would be fulfilled.

Now that the Price Alert system has been in humming along for 5 years, it is clearly time for a complete overhaul and possibly a complete rewrite.

Among the programmers here we've discussed ways to provide people access to their pending Price Alerts while preserving their privacy. What this boils down to is that we'd need people to verify that they are the owner of the email address before being allowed to view and manage their pending requests.

Are you open to the idea of StreetPrices allowing you the option to register with a username and password so that you can manage your Price Alerts?

Alternately, can you suggest another way that we can meet your needs?

[thetrial]

Actually, I was referring to a feature in the system where it sends an automatic response upon sumission of the price alert request. This notice could send the information you mentioned at the time of sumission and let the user know that then the price is reached, the system will notify him/her.

It's important because I'm assuming most people will request price alerts for similar products and if they don't do them all at once, let's say the next day they won't remember which products they have already requested alerts for.

In regards to the the management of price alerts via account registration and web manager, I think it will prove to be too intimidating especially for users who are very concerned about their privacy... Instead I think that in the autoresponses that I talked about above, you could include a link that the users can click on and the system will remove the price alert off the database and give them a page saying it has been removed. It could be done with a simple "price alert ID" in the query string of the link.

[stephen]

Fantastic idea! This guarantees the privacy we require and provides the deletion feature you would like.

Better yet, we can completely implement your suggestion by the end of the day :)

[stephen]

Well, pretty complete anyways. Looks like we'll do some polishing up tomorrow.

The [url=http://www.streetprices.com/Info/ManagePriceAlerts.pl]current version[/url] let's you view your outstanding PriceAlert queue and delete unwanted entries.

[stephen]

Hmm, we're adding more features and completely rewriting Monday's code. Should be the end of the week before the dust settles.

Features we are considering in the final version include:

--sending email verifications with every PriceAlert request (likely feature)

-- integrating the PriceAlert authentication with the Forum authentication
(questionable feature)

-- displaying PriceAlerts in the manager even after they have triggered, unless they are deleted via the web interface (likely feature)

-- allowing triggered alerts to be revived from the dead by resetting them or changing their trigger price (likely feature)

-- including 3 month price history graphs (likely feature)

-- organize by category (questionable feature)

-- change from user + pass syntax to authentication token + session cookie concept (up in the air)

-- shorten the url to fit into 80 columns for us old hat VT100 users (pretty good chance of this feature)

-- looks good under lynx (fair shake of this feature)

Does anyone have additional items on their wish list?

[autumn]

FYI -- the web page itself will now give you immediate confirmation that your price alert has been saved.

DId you want an email confirmation as well as the on-page confirmation?