Black Friday might be the biggest shopping day of the year, but Amazon’s Prime Day is quickly becoming a “Black Friday in July” for shoppers looking to score stellar deals. The (admittedly made-up) retail holiday is now upon us, and there’s a whole lot of price cuts and discounts to be found in every corner of Amazon.
But not everything is always as it seems. Some shady sellers jack up the price of their items just to discount them during Prime Day so that it looks like a lower-than-usual price. So, how do you know if you’re really getting a good deal? There’s an app for that — actually, there’s several!
CamelCamelCamel
CamelCamelCamel is a handy site will sniff out the price changes of any item on Amazon. Just enter the Amazon URL and it does the rest, showing you when the price of the item changed and how much it’s gone up or down since it first went up for sale. Great for spotting huge discounts and also alerting you to fake discounts where the seller raised the base price just to offer a “deal” during a big sale like Prime Day.
Keepa
Keepa is a stellar browser plugin that provides up-to-the-minute pricing information on just about any Amazon product page. It works within Amazon’s own webpages so you’ll always see the price tracking info front and center, and it shows pricing info from both first-party Amazon sellers and third-party retailers.
PriceBlink
Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are great for verifying that an item’s Amazon price has actually dropped for Prime Day, but what about prices on other sites? That’s where PriceBlink comes in. PriceBlink will scour the web and tell you how much those Amazon Prime Day deals cost on other sites so that you never overpay. It checks sites like Buy.com, eBay, and even brick-and-mortar stores in search of the rock bottom lowest price, and it’s not always Amazon!
Honey
Amazon’s Prime Day deals might be great, but what if you could somehow save even more money on the stuff you were about to buy anyway? Honey is a super-popular browser add-on that works hand-in-hand with sites like Amazon to sync up coupon codes that will save you a boatload of cash. The plugin will apply the code that saves you the most money automatically, which means no more comparing and a whole lot of time-saving.
When in doubt: eBay!
Amazon isn’t the only web retailer blowing its top with discounts this week. eBay is hosting a summer “Crash Sale” of its own, with two weeks of huge price cuts on some of the most popular gadgets, appliances, and other highly sought-after products. Everything from Bose noise-canceling headphones to KitchenAid espresso machines is discounted, and eBay will even price match the lowest prices from around the web on tens of thousands of items.