CamelCamelCamel

This site allows you to track price history and has price drop and price watch alerts. Ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago, I've looked at it before I bought anything on Amazon just to make sure I was at or near a historical low. The price charts are intuitive, and allow you to see highs and lows for the past year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month. You can set your tracker to include just Amazon.com, 3rd party sellers, or Used. The best part? It's absolutely free. If you need something immediately, there's not a whole lot this can do for you. But, for example, I've had my eye on the MEElectronics M9P headphones. It's currently $15. Hopping on CamelCamelCamel, I can see that historically, it has run at about $23 until early December, took a dive to $15, a dip all the way down to $10 earlier this month, then popped back up to $15. I don't want to pay 50% more than what it was a few weeks ago, so I'll set up the Tracker to notify me by e-mail when it gets back down to $10.

While I've found some bugs, such as hours-behind updating, and while I wish it incorporated shipping costs, it's still allowed me to save cash. More than that, I learned a long time ago I get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing I got a great deal. CamelCamelCamel give me the data I need. If used car salesmen could hand you data-rich, neutral third-party charts like this every time they told you you were getting a steal, it'd go a long way to negating that sleazy image. Alas, we can only dream, as it only covers Amazon.com and Newegg, BestBuy, BackCountry and Zzounds.com through sister-sites. -- Doug Wong CamelCamelCamel http://camelcamelcamel.com/ Don't forget to comment over at Cool Tools. And remember to submit a tool!

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Anonymous

i’ve been using their extension for Chrome for about a year…very handy
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ghnomdcacenbmilgjigehppbamfndblo

also available for fireox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/the-camelizer-price-history-ch/
wavechild

“Not available for Firefox 4.0″

Bummer.
- Anonymous
  
  We are working on a Firefox 4-compatible version of our add-on and plan to launch it this weekend, provided we fix the last bug(s) that we have found.
  - travtastic
    
    Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA
    
    Have you thought of trying out any forecasting? You’ll notice that line is on a relatively smooth downslope. A little high school statistics application, and you should be able to offer the user an idea of when something will be a certain price, at least within a rez of a couple of weeks. Not for a lot of things obviously, but for stuff that follows a standard pricing curve, like hardware.
    - Anonymous
      
      Forecasting would rule, and is something we’ve considered but haven’t put much time into. Please email me (dan@shup.com) if you’d like to discuss it further.
    - Anonymous
      
      “but for stuff that follows a standard pricing curve”
      
      I feel like an average user, looking at the graph and having a general understanding of market forces (a new model just came out!) would do a *much* better job of forecasting than a computer program. And the program will probably only be accurate for “standard pricing curves” anyways, and those are the graphs you *don’t* need it for (because it’ll already be obvious to a human.)
      - travtastic
        
        For things that do follow a standard curve, there’s actually a very low-tech solution for a user to forecast.
        
        There’s a button on the bottom left of the graphs that will show $0.00 as the y-axis terminus. Click that, get a ruler, and make the ruler roughly follow a line of best fit (so that you have roughly the same number of data points above and below). You can then read off dollar amounts into the future, and estimate the date by seeing where you would fall on the x-axis.
        
        This will work in the short-term but the not the long-term, since you’re looking at convergence (in that no one will sell a product for 0 or negative dollars).
        
        Will it make you look like an idiot? Yes! Is it mathematically sound? Mostly!
        
        Limit of a function: Motivation (Wikipedia)
      - travtastic
        
        As far as “(a new model just came out!)”, you actually can run equations to forecast that, as long as you have continuing data on the old model, after the new model has already been out. A dash of epsilon-delta will basically re-calc the new curve, from when it diverges from the old curve.
        
        But then, it depends. We’ve had three new models of SATA HDD since 500GB drives came out. They’re probably not going to drop under $30. So you also need to be able to identify that value plateau, if you want to avoid waiting around to buy something that won’t get cheaper.
Nightflyer

This is a lovely site! I’ll be using this from now on. Thanks for the recommedation!
Steiny

MushroomMushroom!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  A snake! A snaaaaaaaaaake!
  - lyd
    
    ROFL Antinous and Steiny, I’m glad I’m not the only one. I opened the comments to this post only because I was irresistibly compelled to make some badger-related quip.
penguinchris

I laughed when I noticed that if you click on any of the example links in the comments, the “Camel users who viewed this product also viewed…” contains the other examples people posted in the comments :)
jimh

What’s the best price on those TRON lightcycles?
lostalaska

Been using camel for about 6 months now and love it. It’s super handy when I’m looking through Amazon or NewEgg for electronics projects. There was another price tracker I used to use before I switched to Chrome from Firefox. I’m desperately trying to remember the name of the Firefox plugin that did almost the exact same thing… When I get home I’ll check on my computer if I still have it.

Side note…. the camel website works very well too, even if the plugin isn’t available yet for your browser (which admittedly is way more convenient). You can still copy and paste the URL of a page from amazon into the camel website and it will give you the history that way.
hoffmanbike

gazaro.com used to do this (it looked better) but they stopped doing the graphs and just started doing “price recommendation s” or some crap so i never go there anymore.
Anonymous

@wavechild: i’m using firefox 4, and it seems to work for me.
fremsley

Excellent, have been looking for price history summaries for some time. Very pleased browsing through it.
travtastic

They really need to incorporate shipping costs, at least for non-standardized shipping items (books, DVDs, music, etc. all have preset shipping costs, generally that the seller can’t change).

Here’s a perfect example that I tried off of my list.

250 #0 6×10 KRAFT BUBBLE MAILERS

You’ll see that there was one hell of a precipitous drop on 02-23-2011. I will guarantee you 100% that the shipping on that particular listing was equal to at least the price delta. And probably more, since people are more likely to buy something once it’s in their cart, and they’re primarily attracted to base price, not price+shipping.

So basically, for anything with variable shipping charges, you’ll spend a lot of time doing mental math on an alert only to find out that it’s the same price that it was yesterday.
- Anonymous
  
  We would incorporate shipping data if we could, but Amazon doesn’t provide it to us at the moment.
PaulR

$3,068.99 (down from $3,199.99) for a 74GB drive?

Yes, that’s GB. Not TB.

http://camelcamelcamel.com/74GB-3-5-Sata-10K-Velociraptor/product/B001JEPBMI

I clicked on the ‘Buy Now!’ button: Wonderful: It’s down to ‘only’ $153.96 – “You Save: $3,046.03 (95%)”
- travtastic
  
  You missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime! If you had bought this AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable before December 31st, you would have saved $1,650! The power of hindsight, I know.
Comedian

Market timing is tough, even with the charts from CamelCamelCamel.

Check out this chart, showing amazon itself seeking a sale with price drops (IIRC, listed two items in stock while displaying this behaviour), then right as the reported inventory level dropped to “Only 1 left in stock” the amazon direct price shot back up to the baseline. (From $619.59 back up to $900 the next day.)

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Steiner-256-10-Predator-Binocular/product/B0032O549S?active=summary&cpf=amazon
travtastic

There’s actually a lot of cool stuff to be had on these graphs, even if they look simple.

Cisco-Linksys WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router (Compatible with Linux)

You see the drops so large and quick that they just look like a straight line? That means that sellers are holding on to these for a while, getting pissed off at having it sit on a shelf, and dropped the price substantially just to get rid of it. That’s the marketplace equivalent of clearance, and you could save a lot of money if you have an alert and buy it immediately.The graph resolution looks to be about a day, so those drops on one listing are being ‘fixed’ within the same day, in that someone buys them before the other sellers start to drop to compete.
SonOfSamSeaborn

+1. I love it. In fact, if I’m buying something from Amazon I normally go through their site whether I’m tracking it or not, just to get them the commission. It would be great if you could sync your wishlist with it automatically though, using OAuth if Amazon support it. Between CamelCamelCamel and InvisibleHand, I actually end up temporarily switching to Chromium from Opera when I’m ready to buy something.
travtastic

@OP (Doug Wong?)

You should actually set your trigger on those headphones to $12, not $10. They’re going to fall back down to that before $10. $10 looks like a one-off price from a seller trying to undercut the competition.
- travtastic
  
  And actually, those headphones have a newer and an older version available.
  
  The older version is at $11 right now, whereas the newer version is $45, for the same reasons. I have no idea if there’s a functional difference between versions, though they look about the same.
- diggerdoug
  
  That’s true, except that I also have a tracker on CamelEgg for $10 also, and there’s a pattern of pricing at NewEgg dropping down to $10 occasionally. I suppose I’m just hoping that Amazon will have occasional drops like Newegg does because Newegg would charge me tax. I suppose, taking tax into consideration, I should set my notification on Amazon at $10.90. I completely see your point regarding the price history pattern, though.
  
  Also, re: the other version you mention, you were right in that the M9-BK does have a functional difference from the M9P-BK. No microphone on the M9. The M31 is a higher-end model. I guess I should’ve picked an item that everybody would be familiar with, but when I submitted my review to CoolTools, it was what I happened to be thinking about at the time.
stevew

Their Activation Email system appears to be down now. Can’t Signup and then Sign In and password resets also fail.

I’ve been using StreePrices for a very long time, no logins :) http://www.streetprices.com/ Sorts by shipping, graphs prices, sends reminder emails when target price is hit, covers retailers other than Amazon.
- Anonymous
  
  You dont need an account at camelcamelcamel at all. Creating an account only lets you import your wish list and you must make your wishlist public because Amazon does not have an API to access them. Amazon also does not expose the cost of shipping from 3rd partys via the API so that cant be included.
Anonymous

Love that camel site so much, who runs that?
Uthor

“I’ve had my eye on the MEElectronics M9P headphones. It’s currently $15. Hopping on CamelCamelCamel, I can see that historically, it has run at about $23 until early December, took a dive to $15, a dip all the way down to $10 earlier this month, then popped back up to $15. I don’t want to pay 50% more than what it was a few weeks ago, so I’ll set up the Tracker to notify me by e-mail when it gets back down to $10.”

If you want the headphones now and are willing to pay $15, then why wait?

I never understood the “well, it used to be $x, so it’s a good deal now” or “it was down to $y, so it’s a bad price now” ways of thinking. I don’t care how much something used to cost, but only if it’s at or less than I am willing to pay.
- jere7my
  
  If you want the headphones now and are willing to pay $15, then why wait?
  
  In a month, Doug stands a good chance of having the headphones and $5. You will have only the headphones. If he doesn’t need the headphones now, Doug’s method seems financially prudent to me.
- diggerdoug
  
  “I don’t care how much something used to cost, but only if it’s at or less than I am willing to pay.”
  
  All buyers base their idea of what they are ‘willing to pay’ on a number of different factors. Those can include: what everybody else is willing to pay, what similar products are priced at, how much is in their bank account, as well as what that product used to be priced at.
  
  I’m sure, if you drive a car, you’ve been upset at rising gas prices lately. Why have you been upset? Aren’t you willing to pay $4 / gallon? If they raised it to $5 / gallon, wouldn’t you still buy gasoline? That pain you feel is a direct result of your expectations for the price being based on previous price data.
  
  A year from now, if prices remain the same, you’ll either go about your merry way at nearly $4 / gallon thinking “this is how much gas costs” or maybe you might still be thinking “it used to only cost me $2.50 a gallon!” Either way, that thought is informed by previous prices (recent or remote).
  
  By definition, we base our purchasing decisions based on what we’re willing to pay, and most people use prior prices as part of that decision. Just maybe not for headphones.
  
  But then, I could also phrase it this way: I am willing to spend $10 on a pair of headphones, and naturally want the best headphones I can get that fit my needs and budget. If I get them at significantly reduced price, I can get better headphones for the same budget. Based on the data Camel provides, I can tell which headphones are most likely to fall to within my budget. Who wouldn’t want better stuff for the same amount of money?