I've been covering Prime Day sales for a long time, and in doing so I have learned quite a few solid tips for finding the best deals. The biggest obstacle to overcome in these events is sleuthing out whether or not a discount is actually good or not, which can be tricky if you aren't actively browsing Amazon every day of your life like I do. Fortunately, there's a tool called CamelCamelCamel that handles price tracking for you and it's an absolute lifesaver if you're looking to save as much money as possible.
A lot of what the IGN Deals team does on a daily basis is look for price drops on the products shoppers are most interested in, so knowing historical pricing information is a key part of that. Even outside of Prime Day and other shopping events for my job, I end up using CamelCamelCamel on pretty much anything I buy on Amazon to make sure whatever discount is listed is actually worth my time. There's even a Chrome extension called "The Camelizer" that is just as awesome as the name would suggest.
Some of the Lowest Prime Day Prices Today:
I've featured a quick list of some of the best deals from the current Amazon Prime Day sale above, all of which are at their lowest prices ever. For some of these, like the Kindle deals, I already know what the previous lowest ever price was because I'm constantly checking, but for everything else I rely on the price tracker to tell me. All you need to do is go to the website directly, paste the Amazon URL into the search bar, and it will surface the exact price history of the product you're looking at. For example, if you paste that AirPods Pro 2 deal into the search bar, you'll get something that looks like this:
Right away you'll be able to tell if the current deal is actually a good deal or if Amazon is just offering the same discount it always does. If you spend enough time in this price tracker, it will become pretty clear how the often actual price listed for something is actually new or a typical sale. Using these AirPods as an example, you can see that the baseline price has fairly consistently been around $199, which would be considered a discount. The only times these wireless earbuds have well and truly been discounted were during Black Friday last year and Prime Day this year.
How to find new deals using CamelCamelCamel
In addition to the price checker, CamelCamelCamel is also a great tool for finding popular price drops on pretty much any category of product Amazon also has. If you go to the Top Price Drops section of the website, you can filter all of the products by category based on whether or not they are currently at or near their "Best Price." This is incredibly useful if you're looking for specific deals on this like electronics or toys, but less useful if you have a more narrow search. Here's a quick example of that can look like on any given day:
Don't Rely Too Much on This Tool
It's worth noting that while this tool is a great resource, you should still do some research outside of it. The way the price tracking function works is by monitoring specific product codes in Amazon URLs called ASINs and tracking the price changes for that product. So this becomes a problem when Amazon changes the URL for a product, which it does sometimes. CamelCamelCamel is also unable to see things like coupons or promos, meaning it will only give you the price listed on the page, not the one you'll actually get at checkout. A good example of something this tool wouldn't be able to help you find are things like the buy two, get one free 4K Blu-ray sale going on right now, which I highly recommend you check out.
