I monitor the pricing impacts every day: here are my best tips to help you follow the prices

Do you think a lot about prices lately? You and I both.

I have kept a trace of the impacts that prices could have on a variety of key products which are both popular and likely to be sensitive to prices. However, there is only little that I can follow, since I am only one guy (I swear) and that CNET focuses on technological products and services. If there is a product or type of product that concerns you in terms of tariff inflation, it may be worth doing some work.

Given the results of a recent CNET survey, it is just to say that many of you reading this could have concerns about price increases focused on prices. According to our results, around 38% of buyers feel pressure to make certain purchases before the prices make them more expensive. About 10% say they have already made certain purchases in the hope of bringing them before the price increases, while 27% said they had delayed purchases for products that cost more than $ 500.

If that looks like you, I would like to share a few tips on which I have relied to keep track of price changes in recent months, so that you may be able to keep an eye on the specific things that matter the most. For all the details, continue to read, and to find out more, see CNET coverage of the court’s decision which canceled Trump’s prices.

How to use price trackers on Amazon

Amazon is one of the most popular online shopping portals in the world, so it is an ideal place to keep an eye on price changes. The scope of the company with consumers of all kinds is so vast that even a rumor that it could explicitly show the impacts of the prices on its prices led to an animated response of the White House.

If there is an article for sale, there is a good chance that you can find it on Amazon – and there are a number of websites and additional browser modules that can show you the prices of most of the articles listed. For the CNET Daily Tracker, I personally use the Keepa Extension Browser Extension, which was recommended by Cnet’s main editor, James Bricknell and which is available for Chrome, Safari, Opera, Edge and Firefox Browsers. After having installed it, Keepa works by adding a graphic to the pages of the Amazon store that you visit, showing you the changes in the price of the product over time. You can also refine this graph, by modifying how far the price history goes and adding or deleting the lines for different purchase options.

Another popular option is Camelcamelcamel, which allows you to follow Amazon prices either in copying a link to its search bar, or as a browser extension, available for all the same platforms as Keepa. Unlike Keepa, which adds the graph directly to the product page, this extension – known as “Camelizer” – forces you to open the graphic from a button added to the browser menu bar. In addition to that, the functionality is almost the same.

These two options also allow you to configure e-mail alerts when some products change prices on Amazon.

How to use price trackers for other shopping sites

But perhaps you do not count exclusively on Amazon for your online purchase needs. Perhaps you have followed my advice and canceled your main membership recently, or maybe you just prefer to do business elsewhere for certain things. Well, you are not lucky, because certain pricing services work with other popular retailers, such as Walmart, Target or Best Buy.

If these are the types of places you shop, I suggest you take a look at the much-named Tracer Tracker site, which says that it can provide price history graphics for 88 online retailers. All you have to do is copy and paste the URL of your product in the site’s search field, and it will generate a graph showing you its price over time, just like Keepa and Camelcamelcamel.

How to define new alerts for specific products and companies

Sometimes waiting for prices to change feel too little, too late. If you want to be informed in advance and have an idea of ​​wider changes, you would do well to follow the news concerning specific companies and product sectors.

To do this, I recommend that you create Google alerts related to the products that concern you the most. Using this service, you can define alerts for certain words or sentences – perhaps things like “prices”, “coffee prices” or the “price of the samsung galaxy” – and Google will send you daily emails with reports depending on them. In this way, if reports indicate that a certain grocery article that you buy frequently is about to become more expensive, or if a large technology manufacturer announces a price increase for this new gadget that you expect due to “market conditions”, you will be in advance on the curve.

To find out more, find out if you should or shouldn’t buy a new phone now.