CamelCamelCamel
This site allows you to track price history and has price drop and price watch alerts. Ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago, I've looked at it before I bought anything on Amazon just to make sure I was at or near a historical low. The price charts are intuitive, and allow you to see highs and lows for the past year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month. You can set your tracker to include just Amazon.com, 3rd party sellers, or Used. The best part? It's absolutely free.
If you need something immediately, there's not a whole lot this can do for you. But, for example, I've had my eye on the MEElectronics M9P headphones. It's currently $15. Hopping on CamelCamelCamel, I can see that historically, it has run at about $23 until early December, took a dive to $15, a dip all the way down to $10 earlier this month, then popped back up to $15. I don't want to pay 50% more than what it was a few weeks ago, so I'll set up the Tracker to notify me by e-mail when it gets back down to $10.
While I've found some bugs, such as hours-behind updating, and while I wish it incorporated shipping costs, it's still allowed me to save cash. More than that, I learned a long time ago I get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing I got a great deal.
CamelCamelCamel give me the data I need. If used car salesmen could hand you data-rich, neutral third-party charts like this every time they told you you were getting a steal, it'd go a long way to negating that sleazy image.
Alas, we can only dream, as it only covers Amazon.com and Newegg, BestBuy, BackCountry and Zzounds.com through sister-sites.
-- Doug Wong
CamelCamelCamel
http://camelcamelcamel.com/
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