Best answer: There are a number of price tracking services that you can use to monitor products on Amazon. Our favorite right now is Honey because it’s free, is offered on multiple platforms, and is super easy to use. It’s not the only great price tracker though, so we’ve decided to highlight some other good options as well.
- Prime time prices: Amazon Prime (From $13/month at Amazon)
- Sweet savings: Honey (Free at Honey)
Honey is a sweet saver
We like Honey for a variety of reasons, particularly its ease-of-use, ubiquity, and extensive feature set. Here’s a quick rundown of the service’s features.
First and foremost, for these services to really gain traction, it’s important that they offer the customer value (savings) and that they are low cost, or free. Honey is a free-to-use service that claims to save its customers an average of $126 per year, at an average discount of 17.9%. The company also claims that it has over 30,000 participating merchants offering up data on their pricing. Taken as a whole, this is a great value proposition for customers.
Most price trackers can obviously track the price of an item historically and let you know how the current price compares, but Honey has built a series of tools that can help you dig a little deeper. Its Savings Finder tool is an extension that helps instantly find the best coupon codes for whatever you’re shopping for. Honey Gold is a way for customers to earn gift cards while they shop. Honey’s Droplist keeps customers in the loop by emailing them as soon as a better price is available, so they don’t have to constantly monitor the price themselves. Finally, the Amazon Badge browser extension will show you the best price on the Amazon page you’re looking at. Pretty useful stuff!
Honey also has the widest coverage across platforms, at least based on the trackers we’ve looked at, including stand-alone mobile apps on Android and iOS, as well as browser extensions available on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and Safari. Basically, anywhere you want to use Honey, it’s available.
It’s not all sweetness though
In late 2019, PayPal scooped up Honey for a cool $4 billion dollars in a major acquisition that signaled just how valuable a service these price trackers really are. According to Wired, during the 2019 holiday shopping season, a large number of Amazon customers who were using Honey reported that they were getting popups in their browser from Amazon that said that Honey was malware and a security risk and advising users to uninstall the browser extension. Some of the capabilities of the Honey extension appeared to be disabled for a brief period of time as well.
Honey and PayPal rejected these claims by Amazon and worked to quickly restore full functionality to the service. Since that time, many Amazon shoppers have reported seeing ads on Amazon encouraging them to use Amazon’s own price tool, the Amazon Assistant.
After telling some of its customers to stop using Honey, a startup Paypal just bought for $4 billion and which tracks pricing changes, Amazon advertising its own price-tracking service pic.twitter.com/SSHJpzNUwF
— Jason Del Rey (@DelRey) January 22, 2020
Though the name sounds like the Google Assistant, it’s not a repackaged version of Alexa; rather, it’s a price comparison tool similar to the others on this list. Is it a coincidence that these ad sightings have increased since the spat between Amazon and PayPal/Honey? It doesn’t seem likely.
You want options? You got options
There are so many good options for keeping track of the best prices available on Amazon that there are too many to list in one place. So we did the next best thing; we’ve listed a handful of the top services that you might also want to take a look at.
Amazon Assistant is Amazon’s own home-grown price tracker, and yes, it’s free. It promises to help shoppers track prices across the web, let you see prices over a 30-day period, compare products within the extension, and get updates on your Amazon orders and shipments. It is available for the Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera browsers (but not Safari).
CamelCamelCamel is another free service that monitors prices on Amazon. It can send you alerts when the price of a product you’re monitoring drops, and you can see historical pricing trends for those products. It works in 10 countries, including Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. One cool feature that I really like is that you can import your Amazon wishlist and track those specific items. Oh, and CamelCamelCamel also has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers.
Keepa is a European-based company that works in 12 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Keepa claims to offer a more premium price-tracking experience, and as such charges for that service (up to 15 Euros per month). But what do you get for that fee? Even richer, deeper data on pricing history, best seller and top-seller lists, and more. There is a free option as well if you want to try out the service first before committing to a subscription. Our colleagues at Windows Central reviewed Keepa during Prime Day 2019, so be sure to check out what they thought about the service.
Wikibuy is an interesting player in this price tracking space. It is a division of Capital One (again we see another major financial player getting into this market) based out of Austin, Texas (yeehaw!). Wikibuy uses its free Chrome extension to present crowdsourced deals and updates. It searches thousands of merchants to make sure you’re getting the best deal, and lets you know instantly when it finds a better one. The company also offers Android and iOS mobile apps.
Shopbrain has offices in North America and Europe, and offers instant price comparisons on over one billion products across sites like Amazon, Best Buy, Wallmart, and many more. It’s free to use and features extensions for Chrome and Safari, and mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Save these sites!
There are a ton of coupon sites and price tracking platforms for you to choose from, and in fact, it feels as if we’ve just scrapped the tip of the iceberg. Our biggest takeaway? Do the research, try these services out, and find a service that makes sense for you and how you shop. Oh, and make sure you’ve signed up for Amazon Prime.
Savings, media, and more
Amazon Prime
From $13 per month at Amazon
The best way to get the most from Amazon
If you buy anything from Amazon, you’d be a fool not to be a Prime member. With free shipping on most of what it sells, free streaming TV and movies, free digital books and magazines, unlimited music streaming and photo storage, it’s guaranteed not to disappoint. And you get access to Black Friday deals!
