How do I turn on price drop alerts for Etsy listings?

Question

I have been staring at this one vintage brass mirror for like three weeks now and it is driving me crazy because it is just slightly out of my budget. I have about eighty dollars set aside for this specific hallway project but the seller has it listed for a hundred and ten plus shipping. I am convinced it is gonna go on sale soon because it has been sitting there for a while and they have a lot of stock but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get a simple notification if the price actually drops.

So I was thinking that the heart icon, the favorites thing, would just automatically do it. My logic was that if I favorite an item Etsy would obviously want to tell me when it gets cheaper so I would buy it right? I went into my settings and enabled every single notification under the sun but I am still not getting anything. I read on some help forum that you have to save for later in the cart instead of just favoriting it but I tried that with a different item and nothing happened when that shop ran a 10 percent off sale. It is so frustrating because I do not want to keep refreshing the page every four hours like a crazy person.

I also saw some people mentioning that you only get an email if the seller specifically creates a sale event and not if they just manually lower the base price of the listing which seems totally backwards to me. Like why would the method of price change matter if the end result is a lower price? I am trying to get this done before my sister moves in next month and I really need to know if I am missing a toggle somewhere in the app or if Etsy just does not have this basic feature. I even looked at some chrome extensions but they look super janky and I dont really trust them with my account info. Is there a hidden menu or something? I am literally clicking around the listing page and there is no bell icon or anything similar...

CoffeeCrispCool · Accepted Answer

Quick tip since I had the same issue with a rug last month. Etsy is pretty bad at notifying you for manual price edits, but Ive been really happy with this Etsy price tracker for my vintage finds. It actually catches those small manual drops that the heart icon misses. No complaints at all, it just works well and saves a ton of stress. Definitely a solid workaround for that mirror situation.

ButterTartBake · Answer

I totally agree that Etsy's notification system is basically a nightmare for this!! The same thing happened to me with an amazing brass lamp last year because I was waiting for an alert that never came even though the seller dropped the price by fifty bucks. It was so frustrating, ngl! Since Etsy wont do it natively, using a tracker is definitely the move to catch those sneaky manual price drops. But here is my one big safety tip: stick to the trackers that just ask for the product URL. You really dont want to be giving your Etsy password to some random browser extension just to save twenty dollars. Keeping it simple with a URL-based alert is way safer and it still catches those manual changes perfectly!

CanadarmReach · Answer

Etsys API is pretty limited here and honestly, they dont have a native price drop toggle. Favoriting only pings you if the seller sets up a formal Sale event or a coupon for items in carts. If they just change the price manually, the system wont trigger a notification... kinda annoying. In my experience, using a tracker like Visualping is way more reliable for catching those manual edits.