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Pogue’s Basics: Money - Price checks that go back in time with Camelcamelcamel.com

It might seem weird that a website exists to do nothing but track prices of things sold by Amazon.com.

But that’s exactly the purpose of camelcamelcamel.com (and yes, that’s really its name).

Amazon employs dynamic pricing, meaning that its prices constantly fluctuate based on all kinds of factors, like time of year, popular demand, competitors’ prices, etc. Obviously, you want to do your buying when the prices of things are lowest, right?

Camelcamelcamel is how you find out. It has two key features:

First, it lets you know when a price drops. You type in whatever kind of product you’re eyeing.

Click the one that looks good, and then type in a price where you’d bite. If the price ever drops to that level, camelcamelcamel will email you to let you know.

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Second, camelcamelcamel tracks the price fluctuations of 18 million products sold on Amazon. The idea here is that if you’re about to buy something, you can see if you’re buying it at a good time. You don’t want to buy that toaster oven during a price spike, for example.

This site rewards the patient with savings — and a deep, deep feeling of satisfaction of having beaten the system.

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