5 Of The Best Price Tracking Tools For Online Shopping

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Online shopping has been a normal part of everyday life for quite some time now. Once the general public came to understand the basics of SSL encryption, online shopping with a reputable vendor was safer than giving out your credit card number while ordering over the phone or writing it down on a physical order form. With that new normal came a variety of discounts.

Sales. Coupons. Secret sales. Sales that can only be found through certain affiliates. It can be difficult to track these on your own, which is where various deal-hunting and price-tracking websites, apps, and browser extensions come into play. Not only do they aggregate the latest and greatest discounts, but they also provide price-tracking features that notify you of when particular products you’ve been eyeballing drop below whatever your sweet spot is. For anyone who considers themselves a savvy shopper, using these tools is a must, so let’s take a look at five of the best available options.

When it comes to shopping at Amazon, the curiously named CamelCamelCamel is the price tracker to beat. Not only does it let you set price alerts for anything on Amazon and have a browser extension, The Camelizer, to enhance its functionality, but it also really shines by offering historical Amazon price data.

Let’s use the CamelCamelCamel page for the Fire TV Stick 4K Max to understand how useful this is. The price graph clearly shows that though the device retails at $59.99, it’s repeatedly been on sale from $39.99 to $44.99. This allows you to arm yourself with not just how much you feel you’re willing to pay but also a realistic expectation of what level of discount you can expect in the future. Knowing this, you can then set a price alert for $39.99; that way, you’ll get notified of the next big sale.

CamelCamelCamel also tracks deals on popular products and ongoing price drops across Amazon. For any regular Amazon customer, particularly Prime subscribers, it’s a wonderful tool for making informed decisions as a shopper.

If there’s a name brand in the online deal space, then it’s probably Slickdeals. Not only does it have a variety of curated deals every day, but it also includes a Custom Deal Alert system and an active forum that allows users to post the best deals they found. If the internet has a front page of deal hunting, it’s Slickdeals, and vendors know it. This means that some retailers choose to offer Slickdeals-exclusive promotions that can’t be found in their email newsletters or by searching their websites. For example, one particularly attractive exclusive deal during the holiday 2023 shopping season saw Slickdeals post an exclusive promotion at Adorama where a $1,399 retail pair of Definitive Technology Demand D15 tower speakers went for $499 plus tax with free shipping.

The deal alert page lets you set alerts for many different pre-selected items and categories, but the Custom Deal Alert option is where it shines. In addition to keywords, you can adjust parameters for each alert to narrow down which Slickdeals subforum it was posted in and the minimum rating the deal averaged from the large, rabid user base.

If you’re really hardcore, though? Then, you need to dive into the forum. Not only will you find plenty of good deals that don’t make the front page, but the forum users are particularly creative. If there’s a left-field way to get a good deal, someone there will figure it out.

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One deal tracker is hiding right under everyone’s noses: Google Shopping. Though the search engine’s comparison shopping tool has long been useful, Google Shopping got an update in November 2023 that made it particularly interesting for deal hunters. Before, you just saw price comparisons if you used Google Shopping. Now? Searching for “shop [item or type of item] deals” will now spotlight the best discounts that Google can find, and it’s more clever than you might think. Not only will Google find discounts, but it will also figure out when a particular vendor has a site-wide coupon available and factor that in.

For example, As we alluded to when the updated deal tool launched, searching for “shop video game deals” at the time brought up various results for notable games at QVC.com. Though the cable shopping network’s website may not be an obvious destination for gamers, it was offering a $20 off $40 coupon for new customers at the time, which made for a bunch of very nice game deals.

If you want price alerts through Google Shopping, then you need to use Google’s Chrome web browser. Bookmarking a product page on a supported website will bring up the option of getting notified if the price drops on any site, not just the one you bookmarked. (On mobile, tap the bell icon next to the product name.) If you’re already in the Chrome ecosystem, Google has made its deal tracking pretty frictionless for you going forward.

Slickdeals has almost a quarter century of history as a force in the online deals genre, having launched in 1999, but another major deal site isn’t far behind it. That would be Ben’s Bargains, founded by Ben Chui in 2000 when he was a college sophomore at UC Berkeley. Originally a DVD deals site, it evolved into a generalized tech/electronics deal tracker before branching out into just about everything. However, you can still narrow deals down by product category.

“Considering we regularly find prices anywhere from 10% to 30% lower than the next closest price, we’ve probably collectively saved our viewers a couple hundred million dollars since the inception of BensBargains,” Chui told WiseBread.com in 2008. He’s no longer part of Ben’s Bargains’ day-to-day staff, but the site remains unchanged, down to the same basic layout it’s had for many years.

Like Slickdeals, Ben’s Bargains has a keyword-based deal alert system. Still, it arguably one-ups its slightly older competitor by letting you add price parameters — highest and lowest — to the alerts. (There’s a disclaimer that the alerts don’t track Amazon, though, so you may want to use CamelCamelCamel as a compliment to Ben’s Bargains’ price tracker.) Also, like Slickdeals, Ben’s Bargains has some exclusive deals, and each deal page tracks past prices. All said it’s a very well-run, functional, and easy-to-navigate deal tracker site.

If you’re eyeing browser extensions and coupon codes in particular, then Honey might be a good fit. Launched in 2012, it was purchased by PayPal in late 2019 (finalized during the first week of 2020) for a whopping four billion dollars. Honey was the real deal, boasting 17 million active users each month at the time of the sale. How does it make money? According to a Wired article at the time of the sale announcement, Honey took a commission on each sale it generated.

“But why would stores pay to let consumers buy their stuff for less?” posited Louise Matsakis in the Wired piece. “For the same reason they pay credit card companies and payment processors like PayPal: to make your experience as smooth as possible, and to do everything to prevent you from abandoning your shopping cart, even if that means offering you a lower price.”

Though Honey’s primary feature is its browser extensions finding coupon codes for you while you shop, it also has a price tracking feature. In Honey parlance, this is your “Droplist,” where you add the items you’re eyeing and get notified of price drops. It provides a good mix of two different types of features, resulting in an incredibly popular deal-hunting app.