(NEXSTAR) – If you’re like most online shoppers, you love peeking through the slash mark to see what the price used to be on the item you are about to buy. It feels great to tell yourself you saved a pile of money, but not every Black Friday deal is the best price ever offered for a product.
Take Amazon for example. Like many online retailers, Jeff Bezos’ team started offering deals early this holiday season. But if you’ll recall, the company just had its big Amazon Prime Day last month. So how do you know the deal you are being offered now beats the price from a month ago, or six months before that? Actually, there’s an online tool that tracks exactly that.
The Camelizer browser extension – which works with five different web browsers – will pop out and let you know if the product you are about to toss in your virtual shopping cart has been offered for less in the past. The service also tracks third-party sellers using the platform, so you can see how all available prices have fluctuated across the platform over time.
So, for instance, if this is the year you are finally planning to jump into the Instant Pot cooking fad, you can see that the $89 price for a WiFi-enabled device is actually $10 more than the offered price at one point last month according to the Camelizer. However, the current price is also about $60 cheaper than the highest recent Amazon price, which also came in October.
The tool also tracks the asking price for used items being sold on the Amazon platform, so you can see how much more a new item costs than the lowest ever resale.
The company behind the extension, Camel Camel Camel, tracks its own list of top price drops on Amazon. If you are looking to gift a laptop or a projector this year, it might be worth checking out their list.
Amazon’s 2020 Black Friday deals started on November 20th and run through the traditional Black Friday on the 27th. Not all deals are being released at once. Amazon has been staggering offers to keep shoppers coming back nor new deals.