It’s no surprise that Jeff Bezos appears to be ruling the world these days, with over 100 million Amazon Prime members.
The tough part about shopping on Amazon is that their prices change regularly.
Many buyers are left wondering when a product’s pricing is a “good bargain” or whether it will fall even more.
Enter Amazon price trackers, which will ensure that you always buy when the price is the lowest it has ever been.
Here are my four favourite methods for tracking Amazon prices…
- CamelCamelCamel
CamelCamelCamel is the most popular, most useful website and surely the strangest named website. Not only does the site (and browser extension) let you register and start tracking the price of products on Amazon for free, but it also gives you the “Price History” of the product so you know when the product will be at its lowest historical price. You can also have your price alerts be emailed to you, just register for free, set up your account and let CamelCamelCamel do all the dirty work.
- Keepa
The fine folks at Keepa have created a very useful price tracking site and browser extension to pair with (which even gives you pop-up notifications!).
Similar to Camel, Keepa allows you to track prices, get history data, and get email alerts when the price of an item is lowered, however registration to use Keepa is completely optional.
They also use their pricing data to show you “Daily Deals” from dozen of popular categories like electronics, books, home decor, clothing, and sporting goods, which are a great way to shop for bargains when buying gifts, especially when you don’t have a particular item in mind.
Quick Hack for Keepa: Many shoppers aren’t aware that Keepa also lets you import Amazon “Wish Lists”, just for that added convenience. Great way to save on gifts for friends and family.
- AmzDealz
While similar enough to the two services above, AmzDealz.net does a nice job showing trending Amazon deals. Their tracking bots scour Amazon 24/7 looking for products that have a price which is currently trending lower. This really comes into play when trying to determine when to buy more expensive items like TVs or computers.
If the price is trending lower, just set up a price alert and wait until it goes down again before you make the purchase.
Quick Hack for AmzDealz: If you sign-up for price alerts but aren’t getting emails, check your spam or junk folder as they have a habit of getting buried there.
- Use Google Docs to track prices
A few years ago, the kind folks at Digital Inspirations broke down exactly how you could use Google Docs to track the price of individual items on Amazon. They even included a free sheet that makes the whole thing really easy to setup.
You just give it the Amazon product URL that you want to track and the sheet updates itself automatically. Once initialized, you’ll even get a daily email with the current price of all the products you’re tracking.
If you don’t need (or want) a fancy site or browser add-on when a simple Google doc could do all the work, this sure is pretty cool.