5 Of The Best Price Tracking Tools For Online Shopping

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Online shopping has been a normal part of everyday life for quite some time now. Once the general public came to understand the basics of SSL encryption, online shopping with a reputable vendor was safer than giving out your credit card number while ordering over the phone or writing it down on a physical order form. With that new normal came a variety of discounts.

Sales. Coupons. Secret sales. Sales that can only be found through certain affiliates. It can be difficult to track these on your own, which is where various deal-hunting and price-tracking websites, apps, and browser extensions come into play. Not only do they aggregate the latest and greatest discounts, but they also provide price-tracking features that notify you of when particular products you've been eyeballing drop below whatever your sweet spot is. For anyone who considers themselves a savvy shopper, using these tools is a must, so let's take a look at five of the best available options.

If there's a name brand in the online deal space, then it's probably Slickdeals. Not only does it have a variety of curated deals every day, but it also includes a Custom Deal Alert system and an active forum that allows users to post the best deals they found. If the internet has a front page of deal hunting, it's Slickdeals, and vendors know it. This means that some retailers choose to offer Slickdeals-exclusive promotions that can't be found in their email newsletters or by searching their websites. For example, one particularly attractive exclusive deal during the holiday 2023 shopping season saw Slickdeals post an exclusive promotion at Adorama where a $1,399 retail pair of Definitive Technology Demand D15 tower speakers went for $499 plus tax with free shipping.

The deal alert page lets you set alerts for many different pre-selected items and categories, but the Custom Deal Alert option is where it shines. In addition to keywords, you can adjust parameters for each alert to narrow down which Slickdeals subforum it was posted in and the minimum rating the deal averaged from the large, rabid user base.

If you're really hardcore, though? Then, you need to dive into the forum. Not only will you find plenty of good deals that don't make the front page, but the forum users are particularly creative. If there's a left-field way to get a good deal, someone there will figure it out.

Slickdeals has almost a quarter century of history as a force in the online deals genre, having launched in 1999, but another major deal site isn't far behind it. That would be Ben's Bargains, founded by Ben Chui in 2000 when he was a college sophomore at UC Berkeley. Originally a DVD deals site, it evolved into a generalized tech/electronics deal tracker before branching out into just about everything. However, you can still narrow deals down by product category.

"Considering we regularly find prices anywhere from 10% to 30% lower than the next closest price, we've probably collectively saved our viewers a couple hundred million dollars since the inception of BensBargains," Chui told WiseBread.com in 2008. He's no longer part of Ben's Bargains' day-to-day staff, but the site remains unchanged, down to the same basic layout it's had for many years.

Like Slickdeals, Ben's Bargains has a keyword-based deal alert system. Still, it arguably one-ups its slightly older competitor by letting you add price parameters — highest and lowest — to the alerts. (There's a disclaimer that the alerts don't track Amazon, though, so you may want to use CamelCamelCamel as a compliment to Ben's Bargains' price tracker.) Also, like Slickdeals, Ben's Bargains has some exclusive deals, and each deal page tracks past prices. All said it's a very well-run, functional, and easy-to-navigate deal tracker site.