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Pricecrash Butler — catch Amazon pricing errors fast

Scan Amazon on a schedule for products discounted ≥99% off and hand the catches to Daily Deals Butler as drafts or auto-scheduled posts.

What Pricecrash Butler does

Sellers sometimes forget a decimal point. Catalog teams sometimes miss a flag. When they do, a $400 vacuum shows up at $4, a $2,000 lens at $20, a $89 air fryer at $0.89 — and a smart creator can post the deal before Amazon's automated guards or a human cleanup pull it down.

Pricecrash Butler is the radar. It runs on a schedule, hits the Amazon Creators API for the categories you care about, post-filters every result by discount percentage, and the moment a ≥99%-off product surfaces, the deal gets pushed into Daily Deals Butler as either:

  • a draft in the Search tab (you approve before it posts), or
  • an auto-scheduled post that goes out on the next auto-fire tick.

The threshold is yours — 99% is the default because that's where real pricing errors live, but you can dial it down to 75–85% to widen the net for clearance, overstock, and outlet pricing.

First run

  1. Open Pricecrash Butler in the left nav (it lives under Orders Butler in the Amazon group).
  2. Pick at least one category to scan. "All" sweeps every Amazon department; otherwise multi-select the ones that match your niche.
  3. Decide what should happen when a deal is found:
  • Draft for review — safer; sits in Daily Deals → Search until you approve it.
  • Auto-schedule — fastest; drops straight into Daily Deals → Schedule.
  • No hand-off — just log it in the panel; you act manually.
  1. Click Run. The runner will sweep your selected categories with a small bait-keyword set (clearance / open box / closeout / overstock by default) and report hits in the table at the bottom of the panel.

Recurring scans

Below the run-settings card is the Auto-scan schedule row. Pick a preset — 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, or 24h — and flip the Run automatically switch. The runner will fire on that cadence even when the panel is closed.

The 6h default is a deliberate compromise: frequent enough to catch a glitch before the seller fixes it, infrequent enough to stay polite to the Amazon Creators API rate limit (which is shared across every Butler that talks to PA-API — Daily Commission, CC Check, Daily Deals, Storefront, Levanta, and now Pricecrash).

How "99%" actually works

The Amazon Creators API SearchItems endpoint does not expose a "minimum discount" server-side filter. Pricecrash Butler works around that by:

  1. Iterating each selected category with sortBy: Price:LowToHigh — the cheapest 10 items per page bubble up first, exactly where pricing errors hide.
  2. Parsing the offer block on every result for savingsPercent (already computed by Amazon).
  3. Discarding everything below your threshold and deduplicating by ASIN within the run.

True 99%-off matches are rare on purpose — Amazon's automated guards remove flagrant errors from search results within minutes. Realistic catch rate at the 99% default is 0–2 deals/month over a typical scan footprint. Dial the threshold down to 75–85% if you'd rather treat the workspace as a general "steep discount" radar.

Bait keywords

The bait-keyword textarea controls what the runner searches for in each category. By default the runner uses clearance, open box, closeout, overstock, warehouse deal — these surface unlisted-removed-mispriced inventory better than empty-keyword browses (which the Creators API doesn't even allow).

Paste your own list (comma- or newline-separated) to bias the sweep toward specific brand stems or product types. Empty = use defaults.

Hand-off to Daily Deals Butler

Each found deal is written into Daily Deals' posts.json with source: "pricecrashbutler" and a dealRef containing the ASIN, list price, sale price, and percent-off. From there:

  • Draft mode — the post lands with status: "draft". Open Daily Deals → Search, review, set destinations, hit Publish.
  • Auto-schedule mode — the post lands with status: "scheduled" and scheduledAt: now. The Daily Deals auto-fire daemon picks it up on the next tick (default 30s) and publishes to every enabled destination.

The mode is per-scan — flip the radio between scheduled runs without re-opening Daily Deals.

Topbar tally

While Pricecrash is running, the topbar Hours Saved and Money Saved counters credit the run time at your configured hourly rate — same accounting Orders Butler and Daily Commission Butler use.

Gotchas

  • "Creators API not configured" in the log — open Settings → API Integrations → Creators API and fill in your partner tag, access key, and secret. Pricecrash uses the same credentials as Daily Deals Butler.
  • 429 RequestThrottled — too many Butlers hit PA-API in the same minute. Pricecrash caps scheduled ticks at one page per (category, keyword) for this reason; the manual "Run now" allows multi-page sweeps and is more likely to throttle.
  • Empty runs at 99% — expected. The whole pitch is that 99%-off errors are rare. Lower the threshold.
  • Posts not appearing in Daily Deals — confirm Daily Deals Butler is enabled in Settings; the hand-off writes to that workspace's posts.json, so if Daily Deals isn't visible the deal still lands on disk but you can't see it.

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