Camel Camel Camel

It's a strange title for a blog post, but it's going to save you money.  Here's why...

Prices on Amazon.com are always fluctuating.  Sometimes by a few dollars, sometimes by dozens.  It's really rather crazy.  I can look up an item one evening and the price is $30.  The next morning it could be $36, and by the end of the second day if I check it again it could be $39.  That actually happened once when I was looking at a present for Nate a year ago.  Every time I looked, the price had gone up!

I was getting slightly miffed about it when I discovered a website called CamelCamelCamel.  At this site, one can enter the web address of an item on Amazon, decide what price it has to be lowered to in order to be notified, and when that happens an email comes announcing the item's drop in price.  The site also shows a graph of all the price fluctuations that product has had over the past year or so which is handy.

Here is a perfect example of how this works.  This past week Cody and I decided to get the Just Dance Disney Wii game for Ava for her birthday.  We looked it up on Amazon and it was listed as $29.  I wasn't sure if that was a good price or not, but because I didn't need to buy it right away I put it into price watch on Camel.  The very next morning I got an email letting me know the price had dropped to $15.99.  Um, hello!?!  That is a significant difference only 12 hours after I started watching the price.  I went to Amazon and snatched it.

This is especially helpful on big ticket items like digital cameras.  One can save a lot of money.  But even the small purchases add up after a while.  When I first found the microscope for Nate's birthday it was $70, but I watched it and didn't buy until it dropped to $50.  I love that Camel website!