Can I receive email notifications when Amazon prices hit my target?

Question

Okay so I am like super new to this whole online shopping deal well not new to shopping but like the "hacking" part of it if you can even call it that lol. I've been eyeing this Breville Barista Express for like forever because my sister is getting married in late June and I really want to get her something big but my budget is strictly like 500 dollars maybe 550 if I skip lunch for a week... anyway the price on Amazon just keeps jumping all over the place! One day it is 749 then 699 then back up and it's making me so anxious I literally check the tab on my phone like every hour even when I'm at work which my boss probably hates but whatever. I'm just so excited to finally get her a "grown up" gift but I'm terrified I'll buy it and then the next day it'll be 200 dollars cheaper.

Someone at the gym mentioned that you can get emails sent to you the second the price drops to what you want to pay but they didn't tell me how to do it and I was too embarrassed to ask because they seemed like such a pro at it and I felt like a total dummy. Is this like a secret setting in my Amazon account or something? I looked everywhere in the settings and under my "lists" and "registry" things but I can't find anything that says "tell me when this is cheap." I even tried looking at the "notifications" tab in the app but it just talks about when my packages are arriving which isn't helpful yet!

I'm totally lost and I don't want to miss the deal because I'm worried it'll drop for like an hour and I'll be asleep or something. Do I have to download a weird program or is it just a website? Or like a browser thingy? I heard someone mention something called a "camel" or something which sounds fake honestly but maybe it's real? I really hope it's not something super technical because I'm terrible with computers and usually just break things if it involves more than two clicks. If anyone knows how to set this up so I can stop refreshing the page like a crazy person and actually get an alert in my inbox that would be so cool. Is there a way to make Amazon just tell me when it hits 500?

FringeFestFan · Accepted Answer

Honestly, I used to be just like you, refreshing my browser every ten minutes during my lunch break. I once tracked a high-end mirrorless camera for months and the one time I didnt check for three hours, the price dropped 300 bucks and sold out instantly. I felt like such a total dummy. That camel thing people mentioned is definitely real, its actually a website called CamelCamelCamel and it is basically the gold standard for this kind of stuff. Amazon doesnt actually have a built-in alert me when cheap button because, well, they want you to just pay full price lol. If you are gonna start using trackers, just be a bit careful with a few things I learned the hard way:

Always check if the low price is for a used or refurbished unit because sometimes those alerts can be misleading and you dont want a used gift for a wedding.

Make sure the item is still being shipped by Amazon even if the price is low, as some third-party sellers are super sketchy with shipping times.

Set your alert for maybe 510 or 520 instead of exactly 500, just so you have a heads up before it hits your absolute limit and sells out. I would suggest taking it slow and double-checking the seller ratings before you pull the trigger on a big gift like that. Its way better to be safe than to end up with a broken machine because a deal looked too good to be true. Let me know if you need help figuring out the interface, its pretty simple once you get the hang of it!

TulipTrek · Answer

@Reply #1 - good point! Its a nightmare trying to time these things manually. Amazon doesnt actually have a built-in price alert setting, so you wont find it anywhere in your account. You have to use an external site like CamelCamelCamel. Its basically just a price history tracker that emails you. Another safe option is PricePulse. TL;DR: Amazon wont notify you natively, so use a third-party price tracker to get those emails.

RedDeerRun · Answer

> I even tried looking at the "notifications" tab in the app but it just talks about when my packages are arriving which isn't helpful yet! Quick follow up while I have a sec. Are you planning to set this up on your phone or do you have a computer you use? Some of these tools work better as browser extensions while others are just simple web forms, so your device changes which tool is actually practical for you. I dealt with this exact issue back when I was tracking a high-end espresso machine for my own kitchen. I tried the big name sites everyone mentions, but I found the alerts were sometimes delayed by hours, which is useless for those quick price drops that only last a few minutes. I eventually moved over to PriceDropCatch for my tracking needs. It's a decent option because it's much more straightforward and doesn't have much fluff. It's served me well for a couple of years now without any technical headaches.