Is there a way to be notified when something on my Amazon Wishlist is available cheaply?

May 2, 2012 12:54 PM

Is there a way to be notified when something on my Amazon Wishlist is available cheaply?

I buy a lot of books from various sellers of used books who sell through Amazon. I have a long wishlist there of books I'd like to read someday and would like to be notified when someone has listed a book that I'm interested in for a relatively low price. Is there some way to do this?

(A few times I've managed to take advantage of books that were listed cheaply simply by happening to notice them, but I am only human and I don't want to spend all my time looking at my wishlist; at some point trying to save money gets silly.)

posted by madcaptenor to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Here you go.
posted by John Cohen at 1:00 PM on May 2, 2012 [5 favorites]

camelcamelcamel.com will watch the prices of products on Amazon and alert you when they drop below a certain threshold. It seems to work pretty well. I think it also works for used items. It also produces very interesting graphs of item prices over time.
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:00 PM on May 2, 2012 [3 favorites]

Both of these look like what I want. I'll play around with them later. Thanks!
posted by madcaptenor at 1:06 PM on May 2, 2012

A more straightforward approach is to put the items in your cart, but don't buy them --click on "Buy Later" or "Save For Later" or something like that. I've had items lingering in their for months. Amazon doesn't email me about it, but every time I view my cart, there is a note about price changes on those items.
posted by markhu at 2:58 PM on May 2, 2012

If you're using Firefox, you might want to try installing PriceDrop.

The extension will place a small box on Amazon (and Best Buy) pages which will allow you to track the price of the item when you click it. Everytime you open Firefox, it will check the prices of your items and let you know if any of the prices have changed.

You might also want to check out Ookong. It allows you to see the price history of an item for, I think, about a 6 month period so that you can see if an item is genuinely on sale, or if it's actually at its normal/average price. Personally, I like both of these used in tandem.
posted by shinyblackdog at 3:44 PM on May 2, 2012

Amazon doesn't email me about it, but every time I view my cart, there is a note about price changes on those items.

The drawback is that sometimes the prices can go up by the time you click on your cart again. I had a camera in there once that went up by £50 between clicks.
posted by mippy at 7:16 AM on May 3, 2012

I'm trying to change my wishlist over to Kindle books. I'm syncing camelcamelcamel to it now ... thanks for the pointer, kiltedtaco!
posted by stubie at 4:41 PM on May 7, 2012