The best Amazon price trackers in 2017
It is sometimes difficult to find the right time to make a purchase. If you have a budget for instance, you may want to make sure that the purchase is within its limits.
You may also set upper limits for certain items even if your budget would allow you to pay a higher price for it but you don't need the item right away, or if you don't need it at all but would like to have it anyway if the price is right.
This is where price tracking and notification services come into play. The following guide looks at services that enable you to track item prices on Amazon.
Since there are dozens of them out there, we have looked at those for you and list the best ones below so that you can concentrate on those and don't have to sift through even more to find the one suitable for you.
The best Amazon price trackers in 2017
Before we list the services, we would like to list the requirements that we had for them:
- Service must track at least pricing on Amazon.com, preferably also on local Amazon stores.
- Service must offer option to track pricing and inform you about changes.
- Service must let you track any product on Amazon, not only a selection.
- Service must not be limited to a single category (e.g. games).
- Optional: browser extensions or mobile apps.
Amazon Price Tracker comparison table
| CamelCamelCamel | Keepa | PricePirates | The Tracktor | |
| Stores | Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK, US | Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, UK, US | Germany, US | Canada, France, Germany, Japan, UK, US |
| Signup required | no | yes | no | yes |
| Tracks | Amazon, Marketplace | Amazon, Marketplace | Amazon, Marketplace | Amazon, Marketplace |
| Price history | lifetime | lifetime | none | lifetime |
| Addons | Firefox, Chrome, Bookmarklet | Firefox, Chrome | Chrome | not right now |
| Mobile Apps | none | none | iOs, Android | none |
| Other communication | none | Messenger bot | desktop program | none |
| Notifications | Email, Twitter | Email, Twitter, Facebook, Push | in program | |
| Other features | Amazon wishlist importer | API | tracks eBay as well |
CamelCamelCamel
The long standing service is available as a version for the Web, and as browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox.
You may use most of the sites functionality, including tracking individual items, without registration. To get started, pick one of the available stores (nine in total right now), and run a search.
You may click on an item to get the price history for it displayed on the screen. There you may enable email or Twitter price drop notifications (without registration), and check the last five price changes.
CamelCamelCamel tracks Amazon and marketplace (new and used) price changes automatically, and creates a personalized URL for any item that you track.
Account registration offers additional benefits, such as managing all items that you track on a single page.
Keepa
Keepa works in many regards just like CamelCamelCamel. One difference is that you need to create an account to use the search, and start tracking items.
The service lists the price history of the last three months when you open a product page, and lists the eBay price as well if available. The latter is quite useful, as you may find better prices on eBay at times.
You can track Amazon and marketplace prices individually, and even track multiple Amazon locales at the same time.
The feature may be useful if you make purchases in other Amazon stores occasionally for instance.
Keepa may notify you via email, Twitter or Facebook.
The Tracktor
The Tracktor supports fewer Amazon stores than the two services above. It requires registration, and lets you track the pricing of Amazon and marketplace articles once you have created an account.
You can set up tracking for Amazon and marketplace items individually, but will only receive notifications via email and no other means.
It works well, but is more bare bones than the other services.
PricePirates
PricePirates is available as a desktop program for Windows and OS X, as a mobile app for Android and iOS, and as a Chrome browser extension.
The service allows you to track prices on Amazon Germany and US, eBay, and a couple other shopping sites.
It works different to the services mentioned above. You enter a product name in the interface and run a search for it.
You may then add these products to your watchlist, to receive information once the price of the product drops.
Noteable mentions
Invisible Hand
Invisible Hand is a service that works a bit different. It is not a price tracking service, but a price comparison service.
You need to install the service's browser extension or iOS application, and will get information on better prices as you browse supported shopping sites.
You may also run searches using it, and get a list of the best prices for items that you are interested in.
Pricejump
Pricejump is a different kind of price tracking application. Instead of monitoring products for you on a constant basis, it checks the price of an Amazon product against the price of the item on other supported stores.
While that makes it less of a price tracking service, it may still be useful to you before you make a purchase as it enables you to quickly check whether the Amazon price is indeed the lowest price.
The service is available as web version, Apple iOS application, and as browser extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Other
The following is just a link list of services that enable you to track items on Amazon as well:
If you are interested in creating your own price monitoring service, check out this article on using IFTTT and ScraperWiki for that.
This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News
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