Amazon.com sets the standard for online retailers, but it's not perfect. One feature that Amazon lacks is price alerts (NewEgg.com has this feature, as I suspect many other retailers do).Let's say you're shopping for a particular item--a Black and Decker DCM18S Brew 'n Go Personal Coffeemaker, for instance--but you want to wait for the price to drop before buying. You could check Amazon's site every day while you wait for the price to drop. But if you have better things to do with your time, you could use one of these price alert services:
- http://apricealert.com/ (recommended): This site is currently geared toward somebody who wants to take advantage of Amazon's 30-day price guarantee. (Apparently if a product's price drops within 30 days of your purchase, you can ask Amazon for a refund.) Enter an item number and your email address, and every time the price drops within 30 days of signing up, you'll get notified via email.
The catches: - The alerts work for only 30 days. I don't think the web site makes this clear, but the site's creator told me as much.
- You can't set a desired price. You may be waiting for the coffeemaker to reach $9.99 (which it has), but you'll get an email even if the price drops to $13.99. When I asked the site creator about this, he told me he would add the feature soon.
- http://www.wishlistbuddy.com/: This site is geared toward the person who wants to be alerted when a particular item(s) reaches a particular price. Sounds promising, but there are a couple of catches that make this my second choice rather than my first:
- Alerts are available only for items on your default Amazon wish list, and the list has to be public. Those requirements are a pain, because your default public wish list should be just that--a wish list for your friends and family to use when buying gifts for you. I use other lists to "save" items I'm thinking about buying for myself or others, but I don't necessarily want those lists made public. I think this is an inherent flaw in wishlistbuddy's design.
- You can't cancel your account online. You have to contact the person running wishlistbuddy.com, and he'll cancel your account for you. Yes, the entire service is free, so I shouldn't be too hard on him; but it's not particularly difficult to program an "unsubscribe" feature of sorts. On the plus side, he emailed me back within just a few hours when I asked him some questions.
If/when the http://apricealert.com/ service adds a "target price" feature, we'll have a clear winner.
By the way, the coffeemaker mentioned in this post can potentially save money--particularly in a home where only one person drinks coffee. It makes only one cup at a time, meaning that it's faster than the average coffeemaker and cuts down on the amount of wasted coffee. It also comes with a permanent filter (no, it doesn't require the ludicrously expensive coffee pods; it uses a regular filter basket) and a stainless steel travel mug, so it's a bargain at its $10-18 price range.
18 comments:
aPriceAlert recently added a Firefox extension add-on.
Located here:
http://www.apricealert.com/alert/button.php
See also http://us.pricealerter.co.uk
UK users may also be interested in a UK version for Amazon.co.uk (which covers UK and Ireland):
http://www.pricealerter.co.uk
I'd like to say a word about apricealert.com and some of the other services mentioned here. As always, there is a big variety, ranging from really helpful services to, well, you know what I want to say. RefundPlease is at the lower end. First of all it is really hard to make it accept an Amazon product. You'll find it will reject most of them. If you actually made it, you don't get alerts (at least I never got any). So, what use is it then?
Now I have found a very promising alternative which has everything the others don't have: www.apnoti.com .
First of all these guys have a email notification service, i.e. you get your alerts independent of the browser. Also they do their checks hourly. To use Apnoti, you have to install a browser plug-in. I have tested the plug-in, it works quite straightforward - whenever you are on a Amazon product you want to track, you just press the Apnoti button and there you go. You can also (like at RefundPlease or PriceProtectr) directly enter an Amazon URL and there you go. Talking about it, what I really like is that Apnoti shows you the most recent price drops, a good way to find good deals (they update very fast, so you see proce changes immediately).
I've just created a free Amazon price alert service that adds some of the features you desired:
You can express a desired price (different for new and used versions of the product, if you wish), and it will check the new and used prices for you and notify you when your target is reached.
The alerts work for 30 days, but we email you when they expire, and give you the option of extending it for another 30 days with one click (you can extend as many times as you wish).
There's also a bookmarklet that you can click while browsing Amazon which can pre-fill all of the information required for an alert (email, new price, used price), based on the current prices. For example, I have my default bookmarklet set to 90% of the current price, so when I click it, it has a default price for new of 90% of the current price, and likewise for the used price. This means that it takes only one click of the bookmarklet, and then one click to submit after verifying that the defaults are good -- literally 5 seconds or so from start to finish.
You do not have to sign up or create an account to use it, and you don't have to make things public on your wishlist.
If you have any suggestions for improvement, feedback is most welcome.
The price alert service I use is www.mylistwatcher.com. It enables me to monitor my wish list and my friend’s lists as well. It sends me notification email whenever the price of a watched item drop below my target price. I have been using it for a couple months, it’s been great, except that I’m spending more money on things I normally would not buy, but a bargain is so hard to resists.
do NOT click on that onlinepricealert.com link that "cs" posted. it prompted me to download something. I DON'T THINK SO.
To the anonymous user who said they were prompted to download something from onlinepricealert.com:
I am the developer of that site. It has never required the download or install of anything, nor has any ever been offered. There are no extensions or anything else to install or download. I use nothing but plain HTML and Javascript (no Java, no Flash, no ActiveX, nothing else). There is one bookmarklet you can save, which is plain Javascript, and nothing else.
If you see some kind of a download message when you browse my site, it may be because you are using a very old browser. Internet Explorer 5.0, for example, which was released in 2001 and is horribly out-of-date now, has problems with many perfectly correct pages on many sites. Any recent browser from the last few years should be fine though, and I have tested it on all the major browsers across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
I'd be happy to help you address whatever problem you're having. You're welcome to contact me via http://onlinepricealert.com/contact. If you get a download prompt, please use a different browser that was released within the last few years, and you won't see the message.
Also we at Wishpot have released a price alert functionality. We support price alerts on Amazon, Shopping.com and all the 500+ top retailers.
We also have the "add to wishpot" browser button that makes it easy to add a price alert!
Check out Shopobot - it has everything you want. It's easy to browse and you can see the historical price for an item in an easy to use graph. I'm the head of the project - just drop me a line if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks!
http://amazon.pheedbaq.comJust thought I would mention my own really simple and easy to use service that notifies you if an amazon.com item reaches your desired price. Simply create your public wish list on amazon, then log in to my service and you can enter your target prices for items, then you'll get e-mail notifications when your targets are reached!
http://amazon.pheedbaq.com
A fantastically quick and simple, non-intrusive way of setting an alert for Amazon UK. There is no other UK based website which is even closer to this
http://www.amazonpricealert.co.uk
A fantastically quick and simple, non-intrusive way of setting an alert for Amazon UK. There is no other UK based website which is even closer to this
http://www.bestpricealert.co.uk
I use these tools for Amazon.com.
http;//camelcanelcamel
http://notripe.com
Camel is good for checking 3rd party price. notripe.com is tracking huge number of items price.
Another price tracker for Amazon and other hot products is zoolert :
http://www.zoolert.com
The most useful one I've found is zeezaw.co.uk, they check prices on amazon.co.uk, .com, .de, .ca and .fr. They have an email notification service, a decent search function and a Firefox add-on for setting targets whilst browsing amazon.co.uk.
This is a good one too. It updates price every 5 minutes, which means I can get alert in 5 minutes if the price drops to my target price. Check it.
http://tang-seng.appspot.com/
Hi guys, if you want real time Amazon price drop alerts on your iPhone, I have made a free app here: Bounty Bag App (http://bit.ly/BountyBag8)
Post a Comment