With plenty of year-ending online sales left to be scavenged, it’s worth it to know some of the best ways of having the internet do the hardest parts of shopping for you. Comparison shopping is tough and time-consuming, but we know two web services that can save you a lot of time. If there’s a particular store or item that you’ve got your eye on before Christmas, there are two great ways that you can monitor them and know when great online deals come up or a specific price is met. In this article, let’s go over these two ways how you can get ahead of other shoppers by using Slickdeals and Keepa for automated price alerts.
Slickdeals
If you’re big on shopping, you’ve probably heard of Slickdeals. Slickdeals is fresh off of celebrating its 20th anniversary, offering 20 consecutive days of hand-picked deals to fans of its website. While Slickdeals’ frontpage is a well-recognized revolving door of up-to-date deals, you may not know about arguably its best feature – deal alerts. Slickdeals’ custom deal alerts have personally saved me hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, and they can do the same for you. All you have to do is sign up for a Slickdeals account and navigate to the Deal Alerts page. Once you’ve chosen a keyword for a product you’re interested in, add it by typing it and hitting the Enter key. You can then click More Options to fine-tune your price alert. These options are what make Slickdeals deal alerts so powerful. You can change the target forum, notification method, frequency, and deal rating threshold. By downloading the Slickdeals app on iOS or Android, you open yourself up to deals on the go with Slickdeals’ mobile push notifications. Selecting instant frequency, rather than daily, means that the moment a matching deal is posted, as long as it meets your rating threshold, you’ll know about it. The rating threshold slider may be the most important option on this page. Defaulting to +2, this refers to the number of net upvotes required before your alert is triggered. The non-numerical values refer to special and featured ratings. For this value, you’ll want to use Any for products you’re extremely eager to purchase, but maybe something higher, such as Popular, for a product you’re only interested in if the deal is particularly good, as picked by the community. When satisfied, click on the Add Alert button. You can add as many deals as you want, and these can be defined by keyword, or store or brand name (if supported by Slickdeals). For stores and brands, you can even combine multiple into a single alert. If you end up finding these deal alerts useful on the web, we definitely recommend installing the app on your phone for instant push notifications (as shown above).
Keepa
If you’ve heard of CamelCamelCamel, Keepa is similar, but we believe that Keepa’s browser extensions and charts are much more intuitive and powerful. Keepa is available as a browser extension on Chrome, Firefox, Opera (through the Chrome extension), and Internet Explorer. There are no mobile apps for Keepa, but you can keep up with price alerts on your smartphone if you have an email client, Facebook, Telegram, or RSS reader. Across the top of this chart, you’ll see multiple tabs, one being Track product—clicking this tab will change views and present you with options to do just that. It’s worth noting that there are three tracking modes: Basic, Advanced, and Pro. Basic (shown above) and Advanced are available for free. Advanced options will allow you to set price alerts based on Lightning Deals, add memos and tags, consider shipping costs in prices, and more. To set up your notification preferences, you need to go to the Settings area of the Keepa website. Set any or all of these to receive price alert notifications as you desire. Again, while Keepa does not have a native iOS or Android app, these options (such as Telegram) can be leveraged so that Keepa notifications are easily seen on your smartphone. Lastly, you can see and manage all of your currently tracked items on Keepa’s Tracking Overview page. Here, you can see everything you’re currently tracking at a glance. You can also bulk manage all of your products’ individual settings. It only takes a click and a few keystrokes to change any product’s desired price. Slickdeals and Keepa are godsends if you’re a penny pincher or savvy shopper. These two tools for price alerts give you every advantage, at your desk or smartphone, to beat other shoppers to the punch on some great deals that you may otherwise miss. Once you start getting Slickdeals and Keepa price drop notifications, you’ll wonder what you hadn’t done this sooner!
