Amazon Price Alerts

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:

1. 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.


2. 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.