Amazon. The online retail giant that, regardless of where you are on the globe, you've probably heard of. You may even use it every day.
Have you been using it to it's fullest potential?
In this article, I'm going to go over a couple hacks to make sure you're getting a great deal and an excellent product when shopping on Amazon.
Keepa (price-tracking browser extension)
Keepa allows you to track the price history of any item on Amazon. You'll use it every day you shop on Amazon to make sure that you're getting the best deal. In addition to tracking price history, it has a ton of other features that you'll probably find useful!
Features:
Price History charts for over 400 million Amazon products, even for different versions, colors or sizes of a product.
Compare and track international Amazon prices- Prices for all Amazon locales are listed and can easily be tracked.
Price Drop & Availability Alerts - Set up a price watch directly from the product page. We track any product for you and notify you once the product dropped below your desired price.
We send you a price alert once the price of your tracked product drops below your desired price. We can send you an email, Tweet you, send you a notification to you preferred messenger (Facebook and Telegram) or simply send a web push notification when you are surfing the web. We also have a RSS feed for all your price watches. Whichever way you prefer.
Daily Drops, an overview of recent price drops - Get the real deals. Keepa finds the best deals every day. Find products with the highest drop in price in your favorite product category.
Wishlist Import - You can easily import your whole wishlist and create price watches for every item on it.
Fakespot - Uncover Fake Reviews!
The reviews on Amazon are plentiful and can be incredibly helpful in determining which item to purchase. The problem is, however, since almost everyone is relying on reviews to make their purchasing decisions, merchants are frequently trying to distort the reviews of their products to make them look better than they actually are.
If you don't want to spend countless hours sifting through reviews to find out which ones are reliable and which ones are dummy accounts or paid reviews, check out Fakespot.
You can put any product link from Amazon into Fakespot, and Fakespot will give it a grade: A through F. There are many products for sale on Amazon that get 5-star ratings, but with a Fakespot-adjusted grade of an F. Make sure you're not buying one of these products with highly-deceptive reviews.
Let's see how it works:
Here's what Fakespot.com looks like. We just have to go grab a product link from Amazon to see the outcome.
Let's take a look at this powerbank. It doesn't have a lot of reviews, but it gets a solid 4.5 stars. Let's see if they're legit reviews!
Just go grab the URL from your browser and copy/paste it into Fakespot.
Fakespot gave the powerbank an adjusted grade of a C and if you were to scroll down, you can see various reasons for the grading.
Notice how on the bottom of the screenshot it says that their analysis is getting old. Let's click "ReAnalyze" to get an updated view of things.
Today's analysis came back as a D and Fakespot states "There's a high amount of deception involved." It's probably best to go find another powerbank on Amazon that gets a Fakespot-adjusted grade of B or better. Otherwise, you might find yourself unhappy with your purchase.
With these two tools in hand, you'll be much better equipped to shop on Amazon. When you use Fakespot and Keepa, you'll get better products at lower prices.