Claude Loses Ability to Retrieve Product Pricing Across Retailers

Starting around 8 AM Eastern on April 27, Claude stopped returning pricing information when searching for products on major retailers. Users report that product pages are returned without any visible pricing, and the issue affects Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, and B&H Photo. Only Walmart still shows pricing correctly.

What Users Are Seeing

In a Reddit post on r/ClaudeAI, user u/BlindMaker describes the change: "I could search Amazon products through Claude and get price listings up to April 26. Starting around 8 AM Eastern on April 27 and continuing now, Claude returns product pages without any pricing information visible."

The user tested across multiple retailers by asking Claude to search for a USB-C flash drive. The results were inconsistent: Walmart showed the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe 512GB at $85.67 (down from $99.99), but B&H Photo, Newegg, and Best Buy all listed the product with no price shown.

Scope of the Outage

The issue is not limited to Amazon. The same behavior was observed at Best Buy, Newegg, and B&H Photo. Only Walmart appears unaffected. The user has documentation of successful price lookups up to Sunday, April 26, suggesting the change happened overnight.

What Could Be Happening

Possible causes include:

• Retailers changing their page structure to hide pricing from scrapers/bots, perhaps via JavaScript or dynamic loading that Claude's tool cannot handle.
• Claude's web search tool being blocked or rate-limited by retailer APIs or anti-bot measures.
• A change in how Claude processes page content, possibly a model update that strips pricing data.

No official statement from Anthropic has been released yet. Developers using Claude for price comparison or shopping research should be aware of this limitation and may need to fall back to manual searching or alternative tools.

The user notes that this demonstrates a broader pattern: "Claude can find some products but pricing is missing across most retailers."