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The 5 Best Price Tracking Tools
The E-commerce sector in our nation is booming like never before. Presently, it is occupying the third position with regards to internet users, having 10 million people who shop online. Definitely, there exists a huge potential, which is untapped to make use of.
In India, Flipkart concluded its biggest online sale recently, despite few technical hiccups, they were successful in selling about 2 million items in a day for about 1.5 million people. The sales figure is quite impressive. Its fierce competitor Amazon India has also launched a mega sale later at the great Indian festival and Snapdeal is also not behind, it has been also offering large discounts on varied products in different categories. All in all, it is a good time to shop online.
The prices of varied products at numerous shopping online website do fluctuate frequently and would not be useful if there was a mechanism which will provide alerts, when the prices of specific products, which you are keen to buy, change. Well, Google sheets can be helpful.
Few reason’s as to why the growing trend towards online shopping –
- Many people have busy schedules and work timing is hectic, thus they do not have time to step out and shop around.
- When compared to retail shops, the online sites prices are much lower.
- The online stores offer better options to choose from.
Previously, people were scared to share bank details for online shopping. But now, people buy everything, be it mobile, jewellery or furniture, everything can be brought by a mere click.
Using the Price Tracker-Step by Step
Presently, we can now use the Google sheets based Price tracker to monitor as well as compare the prices of the products on Amazon India, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Infibeam.
The price tracker would take no more than a minute to set up. Any one to get this up without any assistance on their Chrome book. This helps to track the prices of any products, which you are interested to buy for the coming festival or event.
- On your Google drive, click here in order to copy the Price Tracker Google sheet.
- Put the url’s of all products which you are thinking of buying from varied sites such as Snapdeal, Flipkart, Infibeam or Amazon. You will have to put the links on the individual product pages and not search pages or categories. You can also remove or add items from this list, when the price tracker is active.
- Go to the Cell A11 and then put your own email address. The price alerts will arrive at this address.
- Open the India price Tracker menu in the Google Sheet and then choose Authorize. Next, you require going to the same menu and choosing Start tracker in order to start tracking.
By completion, the above steps, you would get daily email alerts when the prices of any of the product which you are looking to own changes. Internally, this particular tool is screen scraping prices from Snapdeal and Flipkart while in case of Amazon, it gets the prices through the Amazon API.
The trackers run once in a day, but you can change the frequency manually. Go to the tools menu, in the sheet and choose the Script editor.
Go to Resources > current triggers and change the frequency of the track prices trigger from daily to hourly.
Notes and Tips
- Prices are monitored and checked every half an hour
- In order to avoid receiving duplicate alerts about the same product remove them from the sheet, once you get an email alert about that item’s price drop.
- Create a filter and then assign the labels to better organize these email alerts.
Five Best Tracking Tools
- Camelcamelcamel − it is one of the favorite ways to receive discounts and track prices on Amazon products. You can install the browser extension(Firefox, Chrome, safari has been removed from the store, although you might be still be able to find it) to get access to the site’s feature without leaving Amazon, or you can copy and paste an Amazon link or the product name on the website.
- Slick Deals Price Tracker − SlickDeals is popular for bringing up up to minute discounts, coupons as well as other deals across the web. That’s not all, their web based price tracker is also great for watching the price on for any item on Amazon or other popular shopping sites like IKEA, Newegg and others.
- Prize Zombie − takes pride about it being a price tracker, which helps you to do comparison shopping. You can also track prices as well as price histories at the same time make sure that the item you wish to buy is actually the best option and fit in your budget.
- The Invisible Hand − is not quite the same like the above tools. It does not track prices for you neither it shows you a price history to know when the best time to buy any item. But it does tell you if the item you are shopping is cheaper elsewhere on the web, how much cheaper and also it helps you to find discounts on things, which you wish to buy right now.
- Cheap shark − While other tools does focus on the products like apparel, electronic, household goods, appliances and products of that nature. The Cheap shark is a great option for those who are looking to save more while buying video games. When you search for a specific game, the Cheap Shark has informed you the cheapest ever price, when it hit that price and gives you the choice to either buy it from the retailer of your choice or you can sign up for price notification if it drop again.
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