On online stores, it is easy to be fooled by attractive promotions, because the crossed out prices are often inflated. To avoid getting scammed, use this free service which will show you the best discounts.
You may have taken advantage of Black Friday to score some great deals with big discounts on products you’ve been eyeing for a long time. But with Christmas approaching, your shopping spree isn’t over yet…and the deals continue. Particularly on Amazon which serves millions of customers each year at this time. Crossed out prices, discounts of 20, 30 or 40%, this avalanche of figures can quickly make you lose touch with reality to encourage you to buy. But how do you know if the discounts presented are not completely artificial compared to the original price?
This is what our colleagues from L’internaute were able to observe during the last Black Friday. Many products saw their prices skyrocket just before the fateful date only to magically drop back down to a reasonable level for the famous “Black Friday”. A well-established technique that allows you to claim strong discounts that aren’t really any.
To avoid being cheated when shopping online, there is no need to force yourself to drastically monitor prices at the major American merchant. A free extension for the main web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Safari), also available as an application for Android and iOS, can take care of this for you: Keepa. Its goal: to show you using a graph the increases and decreases in the price of a product on Amazon over the last few months. It’s then easy to see if the seller has artificially inflated the price during a given period (like Black Friday or a few days before Christmas, for example) and to know if the discount allowed is really worth it. Keepa works completely transparently and autonomously directly in the Amazon store. The service also allows you to be alerted as soon as the product that interests you has the price that you consider to be the most fair. Practical, efficient and free. Not bad for making real savings.
Tracking the price of a product on Amazon is relatively simple with Keepa. Start by installing the extension Keepa that suits your browser. Click on the extension then set the language used and your region and register (to receive price alerts). Then go to the Amazon website and display the product sheet for the product you wish to purchase. Scroll down the page and, under the product description, you should now see a graphic. It displays the evolution of the price of the product concerned over the last three months. The orange background refers to the price charged by Amazon. In purple is the trend observed for the same product, new, sold by third-party merchants on Amazon.
You can also see the offers for the second-hand (Used) and refurbished product. In our example, an Apple Watch Series 8, we can see that the watch was sold for €369 from November 19 to 27 before suddenly rising to 429 euros from November 28 to 29 and dropping to €398 during Black Friday (i.e. 29 euros more expensive than its price excluding promo). So it’s not the best deal at the moment!
To be alerted when the product displays the price that seems most reasonable to you, click on the Product Tracking tab above the chart. Click in the Amazon field. You can see the list of prices charged by the merchant and see the lowest price they have already been able to implement. Select the desired rate click on Start tracking. You will then be alerted by email if the indicated price is reached.
A good way to find out price variations is also to use comparators like Idealo or even the Unearther. They of course only focus on Amazon (which does not always have the best prices) and thus allow you to evaluate whether you are getting a good deal or not.