Craig Snyder · February 3, 2020 · 5 min read Amazon has been the largest e-commerce retailer for years, and as the company has branched out into developing its own massively popular products, such as the Kindle Fire and Echo Dot, there’s no sign of it slowing down.
What was once a modest online book store is now a massive online marketplace that sells its own products directly and also allows third-party merchants to list items for sale. With such a hodgepodge of listings, the frugal and savvy are always looking for new ways to take advantage of Amazon’s deals.
Amazon holds large-scale sales very infrequently, it’s most popular being Prime Day, but prices are slashed and deals are launched every day—so many that it’s hard to keep track of.
However, to the benefit of thousands of shoppers, there are several online Amazon price tracking tools that aggregate Amazon’s millions of products and store price histories. In this article, let’s go over some of the best Amazon price tracking tools for your desktop or browser.
Keepa
Keepa is our pick for the top Amazon price tracking tool in your browser. It’s supported through browser extensions on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge, and even on mobile through the Firefox app.
Although Keepa does offer premium features, I’ve been using it freely for years now and it’s been the best way for me to track the perfect time to snag a product on Amazon.
After creating an account and installing one of Keepa’s browser extensions, it will automatically show price history charts on every Amazon product page.
This allows at-a-glance insight into the best time to purchase a product. This chart alone has saved me from purchasing products for tens of percentages above their frequent lowest prices, and that feels good.
Keepa will also allow you to set up individual price alerts for items directly on Amazon product pages.
When triggered, you can have these price notifications sent to your email, Facebook, Telegram, desktop notifications, or even an RSS feed.
Keepa makes Amazon price-tracking simple and intuitive, and I’ve found no sufficient reason to switch from it to a competing service.
CamelCamelCamel
CamelCamelCamel is surprisingly similar to Keepa. The main difference is the functionality of each’s website, rather than their browser extension. CamelCamelCamel’s website offers an Amazon price tracking tool, which offers very unorderly and inconsistent results. It feels like a step back from simply searching on Amazon directly.
CamelCamelCamel offers browser extensions to users of Firefox and Chrome, and its extension works almost identically to Keepa’s.
The key difference is that Keepa’s price charts embed into the Amazon page itself, whereas CamelCamelCamel’s are accessed via the extension’s icon in your browser’s toolbar. When you navigate to an Amazon product page, you’ll see the extension icon light up. Clicking it will bring up the product’s price chart.
The chart allows you to show or hide price types (Amazon, third-party new, and third-party used), and you can easily create price alerts directly from this pop-out by entering your desired price(s).
Choosing CamelCamelCamel over Keepa is a simple matter of if you require the more polished website features that Keepa provides, or if you prefer one’s charts over the other. Both work very similarly and well.
SlickDeals
SlickDeals is very different from Keepa and CamelCamelCamel. It’s not a traditional Amazon price tracking service in the sense of keeping a database full of price histories. Instead, it relies entirely on the community to submit relevant deals.
There are pros and cons to this method of deal curation, but SlickDeals users have become masters of their craft over the years. SlickDeals was first to catch the $13,000 camera being sold for just $90 (an obvious price mistake) during Prime Day 2019, for example.
Amazon is all over SlickDeals, and it’s one of the official stores they list in their search results. This allows users to narrow deal alerts down to ones that only appear at Amazon.
While you may not be able to feed SlickDeals the URL of an Amazon product to monitor it for price fluctuations, what you can do is add a custom deal alert narrowed down to an exact store, category, brand, and keyword. As shown above, adding this alert would let me know the instant a user finds a deal for a Kingston DataTraveler flash drive on Amazon.
SlickDeals also has an official browser extension, but it functions more like Honey rather than Keepa or CamelCamelCamel. It’s more of a coupon tracker than a price tracker. One advantage SlickDeals does have over the other two trackers on this list, though, is an awesome app for both iOS and Android.
While it’s not necessarily an Amazon price tracking service, you won’t regret giving SlickDeals a try. You’ll be surprised to see the deals that the community finds!
Investing in the time to set up and maintain tracking on one of these three Amazon price tracking and deal-tracking services will pay dividends in the long run. If your goal is to become a more frugal shopper, definitely try out all three options listed above!
