Black Friday and Cyber ??Monday are over, and one of the biggest holidays is still around the corner: Christmas! While savvy shoppers may have gotten rid of Christmas shopping during the two biggest days of the year for deals, they can save more as retailers work to clean up their inventory ahead of the new year.
With a lot of online sales left at the end of the year, it’s worth learning how best to get the internet to do the most difficult purchases for you. Benchmarking is difficult and time consuming, but we know of two web services that can save you a lot of time.
If you’ve spotted a particular store or product before Christmas, there are two great ways to track it and know when great online deals are coming up or when a certain price is met.
In this article, let’s take a look at these two ways to stay ahead of other shoppers using Slickdeals and Keepa for automatic price alerts.
Slickdeals
If you’re into shopping, you’ve probably heard of Slickdeals Slickdeals has just celebrated its 20th anniversary by offering carefully curated deals to fans of its website for 20 consecutive days. While the Slickdeals homepage is the well-known revolving door with the freshest deals, you might not know about its best feature, trade alerts.
Slickdeals‘ Special Deal Alerts have personally saved me hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, and they can do the same for you. All you have to do is sign up for a Slickdeals account and go to the trade alerts page.
Once you’ve chosen a keyword for the product you’re interested in, add it by typing it and pressing Enter. Then you can click More Options to set up a price alert.
It is these parameters that make Slickdeals trade alerts so powerful. You can change the target forum, notification method, frequency, and trade rating threshold.
By downloading the Slickdeals app for iOS or Android, you can make deals on the go with Slickdeals mobile push notifications. Choosing an Instant Frequency rather than a daily one means that the moment the relevant deal is posted, if it meets your rating threshold, you will know about it.
The rating threshold slider may be the most important parameter on this page. The default is +2, this refers to the number of clear votes required to activate your alert. Non-numerical values ??refer to special and selected ratings.
For this value, you will want to use Any for products that you really want to purchase, but perhaps something higher, like Popular, for a product that interests you only if the deal is particularly beneficial, as the community has chosen.
When you’re done, click the Add Alert button.
You can add as many deals as you like and they can be identified by keyword, store, or brand (if supported by Slickdeals
If you find these trade alerts useful online, we definitely recommend installing an instant push notification app on your phone (as shown above). 
Keepa
If you’ve heard of CamelCamelCamel, Keepa is similar, but we find Keepa‘s browser extensions and charts much more intuitive and effective.
Keepa is an Amazon and eBay price tracking service that includes price history charts, price drop and availability alerts, and more. While Keepa only supports Amazon and eBay, these two storefronts make up a significant chunk of the e-commerce space.
Keepa is available as a browser extension in Chrome, Firefox, Opera (via a Chrome extension) and Internet Explorer There are no mobile apps for Keepa, but you can get price alerts on your smartphone if you have an email client, Facebook, Telegram, or an RSS reader.
Once you create an account and install the browser extension, Keepa will automatically display price history charts on every Amazon product page.
At the top of this chart, you will see several tabs, one of which is Product Tracking. When you click on this tab, you change the view and present options for doing so.
Keepa maintains tracking of products sold by new and used Amazon and third-party sellers. While you cannot track items on eBay, any items tracked on Amazon will also offer charts for compared eBay results.
It’s worth noting that there are three tracking modes: Basic, Advanced, and Professional. Basic (shown above) and Advanced are available for free. Advanced options let you set Lightning Deals based price alerts, add notes and tags, price shipping charges, and more.
To set up notifications, you need to go to the settings area on the Keepa website.
Install any or all of them to receive price alerts as you wish. Again, while Keepa doesn’t have its own iOS or Android app, these options (like Telegram) can be used to make Keepa‘s notifications easily visible on your smartphone.
Finally, you can view and manage all the items you track from Keepa‘s tracking overview page.
Here you can see at a glance everything that you are tracking. You can also massively manage individual settings for all of your products. It takes just one click and a few keystrokes to change the desired price of any product.
Slickdeals and Keepa are a godsend if you are a fastidious or savvy shopper. These two price alert tools give you all the edge, on your desk or smartphone, to stay ahead of other shoppers on some great deals you might otherwise miss. As soon as you start receiving price drop notifications for Slickdeals and Keepa, you’ll be surprised you didn’t do it sooner!
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