How to Understand Amazon Price History
Everyone knows Amazon is the largest e-commerce site. One of the most significant reasons behind this is the vast range of products on the platform.
But on top of its wide array of product offerings, Amazon is also incredibly successful due to a constant fluctuation in prices, which pushes sellers to be competitive at all times.
If you’re a professional Amazon seller, one of the essential tools you should know how to use is an Amazon price tracker.
What is an Amazon price tracker?
An Amazon price tracker helps you track the fluctuations in product prices. In addition to this, it also sends you notifications when a product you’ve flagged drops in price.
This way, you can simplify the whole process of price comparisons and keep up with—or better yet, stay ahead of—the competition.
It will also give you a better chance to win the ever-popular Amazon buy box. It’s said that as many as 80% of sales come through the “Add to Cart” button, with even more sales coming via mobile devices.
Why use Amazon price history data?
As a seller, you’re interested in staying ahead of the competition so you don’t lose potential sales. And while price plays into that, as we already mentioned, historical data goes farther than that.
Not only will you be able to track your competition in terms of product prices, but you can also see the types of reviews they’re getting on those items. This will give you a clearer picture of the kind of profit they’re making as well.
How to stay on top of Amazon price history fluctuations
You can always use spreadsheets to track price changes manually, but this means losing valuable time that you could be spending on other activities.
A better idea is to check out one of the many Amazon price tracking apps available online. These make it simple for you to track prices and the frequency with which Amazon updates those prices.
Here are a few examples for you:
- CamelCamelCamel tracks prices in various Amazon marketplaces such as the US, UK, Italy, France, Canada, Spain, and Germany.
- Keepa offers in-depth price history of millions of products; you can even track and compare international prices.
- Penny Parrot has a convenient shortcut that makes it simple to track the prices of your favorite items on your iPhone and iPad. It also offers extensions for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge.
How does an Amazon price history tracker work?
When you’ve chosen an Amazon price history tracker, you can select the products that you want to monitor. From there, the app should send you a notification when there’s been a price drop. This usually happens via email.
The email you receive will typically consist of the following details:
- The name of the product
- Its current selling price
- How much you can save when making a purchase
- The option to add that particular item to your cart
Virtually all of these trackers also offer sellers a pattern that can predict when and how much a product will change in price. You’ll usually be able to see a month’s worth of history for your selected item’s price fluctuations—sometimes even the entire history—usually in simple, easy-to-read graphs.
Checking price history via Amazon
If you don’t want to use a price-tracking app, as mentioned above, it’s also possible to check the price history of virtually any product on Amazon.
According to Amazon:
“Our prices change continually. ‘List Price’ means the suggested retail price of a product provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. We regularly check List Prices against prices recently found on Amazon and other retailers. Certain products may have a ‘Was Price’ displayed, which is determined using recent price history of the product on Amazon.”
We suggest using an app instead of the Amazon price history because Amazon doesn’t usually alert customers of price drops. Alerts pop up now and then, but they aren’t consistent.
Double your chances of success with AccelerList
One of the main factors in your Amazon success story is beating out the competition by offering competitive prices—tracking Amazon’s price history can help you do just that.
Another critical piece of the puzzle is staying on top of your inventory. AccelerList makes it simple, from listing to repricing to accounting. What’s more, we enable you to easily cross-list from Amazon to eBay, doubling your chances of selling every item you list.
Check out a free trial today!
