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

Bummer.

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.

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.

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%)”

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?