Camelcamelcamel Site Review

Like many, I do quite a bit of my shopping on Amazon.  It’s getting more difficult to ignore the juggernaut of online shopping as time goes on.  They’re reliable, have virtually everything, and make shopping quick and easy.  They also have the best and most comprehensive body of product reviews out there. 

That said, I used to get sick of price fluctuations for things I buy regularly.  Or worse yet, I hated seeing that something was 30% cheaper the week after I bought it. 

Enter Camelcamlecamel.

Camelcamelcamel is an Amazon money saving machine, plain and simple.  They track and keep historical prices for products on Amazon, map out trends, and find the best time to buy.  I’ve probably saved over a thousand dollars alone on Amazon by using this site since I discovered it a few years back. 

Simply establish a free account at the site and enter the url for an Amazon product that you buy or that you are interested in.  I’ll use something I regularly buy which is this Gevalia coffee – but I only buy it when Camelcamelcamel tells me to which is what I’ll explain.  You’ll get a page that looks like this:

 

Don’t freak out, it looks a little bit techy with the graph and it’s a bit crowded.  But it’s pretty simple to use.  All you need to really pay attention to is the green line on the graph, which is the recent price history. 

More directly, if you’re like me and refuse to pay a cent more than you have to then just look at the bottom of the image where it says “Lowest”.  That’s the lowest price that’s been run for the product. 

In this case as you can see it’s been that cheap twice – around late 2017 and again in September 2018.  Both times I hogged up a few bags 🙂

A 20oz bag of coffee for $6.99 is a pretty good deal.  Sure, there are other brands that are cheaper, but coffee is a personal thing. 

I‘m not a coffee snob by any means, but I’ve found 5-10 brands that I like a lot and Gevalia is one of them.  Not to start a coffee war, but most people blindly buy a 10oz bag of Starbucks coffee for $10 or more.  This Gevalia deal is twice as much coffee for about half the price.

 

Set Alerts

All you have to do to set an email alert is enter the price you would like to be alerted for in the provided box.  For many or even most products, the site will track the Amazon price as well as 3rd party seller prices, and sometimes even 3rd party used prices. 

You do have to be careful because the latter two usually will not include shipping costs, where the Amazon price will usually include it, especially if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber.  That’s it really.  Camelcamelcamel will send you an email when the product reaches your desired sale price or goes below it.

So how does this site make money?  Well it’s just one huge Amazon affiliate site, similar to Ebates or Kinja Deals or others out there.  When you get an email from Camelcamelcamel saying your product has reached your threshold price, if you click on the product link from that email and buy the product, then Camelcamelcamel gets an affiliate payout from Amazon for linking you to Amazon. 

But don’t do that. 

Here’s what you should do.  Establish an account at Ebates or Swagbucks or any of the money back sites and copy the name of the product (not the url) from your Camelcamelcamel email over to those money back sites and buy the product that way.  That way you get even more cash back from the already low deal that Camelcamelcamel alerted you to. 

So in the case of my Gevalia coffee, I paid $6.99 on Amazon but also got back another 14¢ from Ebates.  Final price, $6.84. 

I know, now I can go FatFire 😉 

But hey, every cent counts, and over the course of a year I’m recovering much of my Amazon Prime membership costs just by using Ebates.  And once you have accounts and quick bookmarks to these sites it literally takes zero effort and about 2 seconds to do it. 

If you want a better example of how bigger savings add up, take the whey protein that I buy.  A 4.8lb “Tub” usually sells for around $55, when I wrote this post it was going for $53.99

 

But alas, Camelcamelcamel to the rescue, sweeping in like the money saving super hero of frugal fantasies.  It periodically goes on sale for $40.59!!  That’s $13 cheaper than the current price.  I have my email alert set for $41.00 as you can see below.

 

 

I saved myself $13.00!  And if you look back to the Amazon screenshot you’ll see that indeed I did buy it on January 8th of this year, matching the $40.59 sale price that Camelcamelcamel indicates. 

Because they sent me an email about it.  All hail email!!

 

Hiccups

Lastly, I should mention that Camelcamelcamel does have some hiccups now and then.  After using the site for a few years I’ve noticed it struggles with product options or sizes sometimes.  In other words, if you’re tracking a pair of running shoes and you want the orange color in size 12, it may miss the sale or alert you when another color pops up on sale. 

I’ve also gotten alerts a few times and went right to Amazon to get the deal, only to find it wasn’t really on sale.  My only explanation is if you think about it, what this site is doing is really really sophisticated and data-heavy.  And with the zillions of listings on Amazon, they’re going to have mistakes and false alerts now and then. 

Product listings go up and down all the time, new models come in, flavors change, and 3rd party sellers come and go.  I find it amazing that the site is actually as reliable as it is. 

Lastly, I have no relationship with the site nor do I make any money from promoting them.  I do however save tons of money from their service.

*This article contains affiliate links. Using those links throws some change in my pocket at no additional cost to you. Here’s my disclosure.