This closure was temporary and ended in May, 2020.
On March 23, 2020, I had a conversation with Amazon EU where they said they were asking all affiliates to stop sending traffic to their sites during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. This is due to most items being out of stock, and their desire to focus on getting the necessities to people who need them.
We believe this logic. It doesn't help anyone except the toilet paper hoarders if all of the deals blogs of the world notify people when inventory is back and those few tech savvy people end up with all the supply. Everyone needs access to necessities, not just those who are savvy enough to know how to monitor inventory.
We have also seen proof that almost everything is out of stock in places like Spain and Italy: our sites in those countries appeared broken for much of the last week, and we couldn't find the bug. It turns out that everything was simply out of stock, so we weren't discovering any price drops anyway; we were just adding load to Amazon's systems for very little gain.
Everyone is worried about price gouging. But the only price gouging we've seen is from third party merchants, not Amazon itself, and they have promised to do more to prevent this behavior. One way they are doing so is to limit third party shipments to their warehouses. No third party inventory means no opportunity for third party price gouging.
All that being said, we are working on a new product search engine which will allow users to look at our existing data. Our current search engine is based on Amazon's API, which we cannot use, so it is being replaced. It will not have new prices being added during this crisis, but at least the existing data will be available. We hope to have this online soon, but it is not a small task.
Thank you for your continued support. Stay safe out there.