3 Easy Steps for Beating Amazon.com’s Fluctuating Prices

3 Easy Steps for Beating Amazon.com’s Fluctuating Prices May 25, 2016

(An Indian man riding a camel. Gouache painting by an Indian, no date given; Source: Wikimedia, CC by 4.0)
(An Indian man riding a camel. Gouache painting by an Indian, no date given; Source: Wikimedia, CC by 4.0)

Many of you have no doubt experienced one of the two following scenarios when purchasing items from Amazon:

  1. An item you saved for later drastically increased in price
  2. An item you saved for later dove in price to your pleasant surprise
  3. Some other variation on these.

These might have led you to track the prices of things you want to purchase in the hope of getting the best deal. But there is a much more effective way to do this.

There is a website called Camel Camel Camel (started either by smokers or dromedary enthusiasts).

They describe their totally free niche as:

Our free Amazon price tracker monitors millions of products and alerts you when prices drop, helping you decide when to buy.

Here are the basics of how you use it.

  1. Grab a book URL from Amazon. I’ve chosen Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life, which I purchased recently thanks to information gathered from Camel Camel Camel. It is presently 60% off the $50 price, which seems pretty sweet, right?  The URL is: http://www.amazon.com/Maurice-Blondel-Philosophical-Ressourcement-Retrieval/dp/0802863655/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1464183370&sr=8-2&keywords=oliva+blanchette
  2. Plug it into the price tracker at the top of the Camel Camel Camel page.
  3. Take a look at the results:

Capture

The conclusion? The current $20 price could be halved, if you’re lucky. Again, remember there is no guarantee that prices will fall your way immediately. You might have to wait for a while.

Also, remember that this search engine doesn’t only work for books, but anything you purchase on Amazon.

I would also encourage you to first click through Amazon links provided by blog writers like yours truly. The Amazon Associates program gives us up to a 7% kickback at no cost to you. It doesn’t matter what you end up buying (sinks, lingere, or laptops), so long as you first reach Amazon by clicking one of our links.

Certain readers of Cosmos the in Lost have taken an active approach of first clicking through my links before making any purchase. Their actions have helped to keep this blog going with some serious pocket change.

If you want to try out the Associates method of sponsoring a blog, then click through links in the post Big Win for Little Sisters is a Huge Loss for Catholicism. Your best bet is an italicized book title. That way you don’t have to put much concerted effort into finding my booklists such as TOP10 Books to Build Upon Trinity Sunday in order to sponsor this blog.

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