In the U.S., tax season is well upon us. And with the recession in full tilt, you may be--smartly--biding your time to make a purchase. Fear not though, there are tools aplenty to help you keep an eye on the price of something, and swoop in to get it when it goes on sale or the manufacturer offers a rebate.
We've put together a list of 22 different tools that let you do this with relative ease. Most only work on Amazon.com, but a few will keep an eye on the entirety of the Web to let you know about sales, price drops, and increases.
(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
Amazon Price Watch (aka NukePrice.com)
Amazon Price Watch may sound like it's only Amazon.com prices, but it actually works with around 100 online retailers. You can have it watch the price of something by dropping its link into the service's Web form, or by installing a browser add-on that lets you start tracking from the retailer's site. Along with price-watching tools, it's also got a deals finder and a "filler items" tool that will help you find low-priced items to add to your Amazon order to get free shipping.
Apnoti
Apnoti watches Amazon for price drops. You can use it either by dropping in the Amazon product link and your e-mail address or installing a tool bar that adds the option to watch a price to Amazon.com. One of Apnoti's strengths is that it refreshes its price index "continuously" so you can be notified when a price drops usually within the hour.
BeatThat!
BeatThat is primarily a deals site that lets users add deals they've found in return for cash. However, each product on the site can be watched to see if it drops below whatever price threshold you set. Like PriceGrabber you must be a registered user of the site to make use of this feature.
Buy it Later
Buy it Later is a tool that's been designed specifically for Amazon.com. You install a small browser add-on, which will add a new button to Amazon product pages that lets you opt-in to buy it at a later date. Once you click this the tool will start tracking the price. It also gives you the heads up when an item comes back in stock, which can be useful if you're looking to buy something with a low supply.
CamelCamelCamel
While camel imagery does not bring price watching to mind, the site does a great job at it. You can search items on Amazon and a few other retailers. It's also got a great grid of products that have had the biggest price drops by day and week both in dollar amount and in percentage. One of the most important things the site does, however, is show you a price history from the past month both from Amazon and third-party retailers. This is a good way to see whether a price is trending up or down, although admittedly its charts can be thrown off by gray market listings.
I don't know about you, but I often find myself saying "I'd totally buy that if it cost $__ less." It happens to me all the time with items such as RAM, video cards, Windows Vista (joking), and the Amazon Kindle. Luckily there are two handy services to help keep tabs on prices for online goods.
The first, and newer of the two is called Waitable. It simply monitors the price of whatever items you put in either by URL, Amazon.com sales number, or UPC code. All you need to do is plug in what price you'd like to pay (a la Priceline) and it sends you an e-mail if the item is selling at or below your requested amount.
In addition to e-mail notifications, Waitable provides an RSS feed you can subscribe to, or plug into your favorite feed reader to avoid having to check your in-box. The service only works on Amazon.com at the moment, but after seeing what PriceProtectr (review) can do on price drops after you buy something, I can imagine seeing other online retailers making their way on there in the future.
The other service is called WishRadar, and has a larger emphasis on what you can do with the list of items you put together. You can create and share various wishlists ad nauseum. It also imports whatever pre-existing list of products you've got on your Amazon.com wishlist, along with a bookmarklet you can click to add any product you're looking at (on Amazon or Half.com) without having to copy and paste.
The one thing both of these services are missing is a way to view a product's life cycle to see if there have been any price drops or fluctuations in the past. For example, a pair of headphones I bought and use on a daily basis quite regularly jump from about $90 to $70 on Amazon, and neither of these services would tell you that. Likewise, predictive services such as Farecast, have created algorithms to tell what's going to happen to the future price of airfare--something that could potentially be automated with reoccurring life cycles of major electronic goods.
See also: Price Protectr: Watch for Price Drops without Watching
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Price Protectr is a service that monitors online stores and alerts you to any changes in price within 30 days of buying a product. If it sounds simple it is, and frankly that's the way it should be.
Nobody likes finding out they could have saved money if they had paid attention to price drops, but it's easier said than done. Price Protectr does the work for you. All you have to do is give them the URL of the product you bought and your e-mail, and it will keep an eye on it for 30 days. If there's ever a change, you get an e-mail alerting you to the fact.
Price Protectr doesn't work with every online store. In fact right now it only works with ten of the major online retailers, and only for the United States and some of Canada. Nonetheless, it's a simple solution to the simple problem of human laziness. See also RefundPlease.
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