Amazon is an incredible resource for consumers, offering can’t-miss deals just a mouse-click away. One of the reasons for the site’s success is constantly shifting prices that undercut their competition. By remaining patient on purchases, consumers can take advantage of the short period of time Amazon’s products are at their lowest prices.
New price-tracking tools have begun to pop up. These programs assist buyers in saving as much money as possible while earning a commission from Amazon. CamelCamelCamel and The Tracktor are two of the most popular price tracking tools on the internet, and Dealspotr has created this handy comparison guide outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each tool.
CamelCamelCamel is so-named for the humplike-shape that price-tracking graphs tend to have; this shape is a direct result of Amazon products’ steep but short-lived discount periods. According to RetailWire.com, the price tracker actually receives its information directly from Amazon.
While CamelCamelCamel has achieved its ubiquity through a variety of additional features, at its core the tracker is fairly easy to use. The most common feature for users is the simple “search” function.
Enter a SKU or URL into the search field and find pricing information like the highest and lowest price, the average price over a given time period, and the date which the product hit its peak price. Best of all, there is no need to sign up or register with CamelCamelCamel in order to use all of the tracker’s features.
The Tracktor provides many of the same features and reports as CamelCamelCamel, but Cheapism.com describes it as taking a bare-bones approach to price tracking. DealDump.com agrees that the tracker does offer the same basic functionalities of CamelCamelCamel.
Using The Tracktor, consumers can search for a product using either its name, a web-store URL, or the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). Once you have searched for a product, the tracker displays its historical pricing data.
Most publications did bemoan the fact that users must register with The Tracktor before they can use any of its features.
RetailWire.com reports that CamelCamelCamel offers price histories on over 18 million Amazon products and counting. The price tracker has listings for all nine Amazon stores as well as BestBuy.com.
NewEgg.com recently kicked the price tracker out of its affiliates program. This development has made CamelCamelCamel wary of the fact that one day Amazon may cut it off too.
As a simpler and less-prestigious price tracker, The Tracktor does not support all Amazon stores, instead offering price information on six of the site’s web-stores. The online price tracker has data for both used and new Amazon items.
Engadget.com writer TJ Luoma writes that The Tracktor is exclusively for consumers in the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
In a poll of its readership, Lifehacker.com found CamelCamelCamel was the single most popular Amazon price tracker. This popularity is owed in large part to the tool’s excellent features that make it easy to find the best price on the products you are shopping for.
Users are able to set up “price watches” that provide alerts to their email inbox and even a public or private message to the user’s Twitter account. In addition, CamelCamelCamel offers prefabricated RSS feeds that display the most recent and largest price drops on Amazon.
Earlier we mentioned that there is no requirement to register and create an account with CamelCamelCamel. However, if you do take time to complete that step additional functions become available, including the ability to import your Amazon wish-lists and organize the items you want to monitor.
There is an add-on for Firefox and Safari browsers, but recently Google Chrome removed it from their store. These add-ons make it possible for the consumer to access CamelCamelCamel’s features without ever leaving the Amazon web-store.
In keeping with the theme that The Tracktor is a stripped down version of the service offered by CamelCamelCamel, it also has fewer convoluting features. That being said, the price tracker does come with a few helpful functions for registered users.
Like its competitor, The Tracktor provides a notification system for potential-buyers, sending an email when the price of a tracked item falls below a predetermined amount. Another helpful feature is the “trending” section, which shows what products are catching other consumers’ attention.
The Tracktor offers Safari, Chrome and Firefox browser extensions.
While this comparison may indicate that CamelCamelCamel is the superior price tracker, it by no means makes The Tracktor a poor one. The former is simply more complicated and allows for more customizable shopping while the latter offers a simplistic experience for consumers.
