price alerts for amazon

Use a Google Spreadsheet to track items on various Amazon websites and get pricedrop alerts by email.

Introduction

You can use a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of prices of any product listed on Amazonshopping websites and get email alerts when the prices go down or up. The price trackersupports all Amazon country specific websites include amazon.com (US), amazon.co.uk(UK), amazon.es (Spain), amazon.de (Germany), amazon.in (India), amazon.fr (France),amazon.jp (Japan), amazon.it (Italy) and amazon.ca (Canada).

You can download the Amazon Price Tracker from Digital Inspiration. The premium editionlets you monitor prices of unlimited number of items and you can choose to receive emailalerts when the price meets your desired price.

For support, send an email to Amit Agarwal at [email protected] or tweet @labnol.

Amazon Price Tracker

Digital Inspiration www.ctrlq.org

http://www.labnol.org/internet/amazon-price-tracker/28156/

http://ctrlq.org/

http://twitter.com/labnol

Step 1: Copy Sheet

Open the link in your email and click the "Make a copy" button to clone the Amazon PriceTracker spreadsheet in your Google Drive.



Step 2: Authorize the Program

Inside the spreadsheet, choose the Amazon Price Tracker menu and select Authorize.



Continue

Click continue to run the authorization wizard.



Accept

Authorize the Amazon Price Tracker to access your Google account. It needs thesepermissions to read the list of items saved in your Google spreadsheet, for connecting to anexternal service (Amazon API) for fetching the product prices and, should the price drop,send email alerts to your address.

The script runs in your own Google Drive and you can also view the entire source codeinside the Script editor of the spreadsheet. Click the Accept button to continue



http://ctrlq.org/code/19882-amazon-api-php

Step 3: Start the Price Tracker

Once the script is authorized, go to the Amazon Price Tracker menu in the spreadsheet andchoose Start Tracker.



Configure

This is an important step. You need to specify your email address where the alerts would go,your current timezone and also choose the time when you wish to receive the price alerts. Ifyou have set a target price for any product, the price drop alerts will be sent instantly elseyou'll receive a daily email digest of all track product whose prices have changed in theprevious day. Save your changes and close the Configure window.



Step 4: Add Products

Now that the Amazon Price Tracker has been successfully initialized, you should now addone or more products to the watch list. Go to any amazon.* website, open any product pageand enter the full link (URL) of the product in column A (one product per line).

You should only enter links to product pages on Amazon and not search results pages orcategory pages. For instance, here’s the product page for iPad on AMazon and here’s thesearch page for iPad – you need to put the URL of the product page in the spreadsheet.



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00OTWNSMM/ctrlqorg-20/

http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393193&linkCode=shr&tag=ctrlqorg-20&linkId=MV7LNEZBQQ2GLDNW&st=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1232597011%2Ck%3Aipad%2Cp_n_operating_system_browse-bin%3A3077591011%2Cp_n_condition-type%3A2224371011%2Cp_72%3A1248879011&keywords=ipad&qid=1421162800&rnid=1248877011

Set Desired Price

This step is optional but if you wish to receive instant emailalerts when the price of aparticular product drops by x% or when the price drops to $y or lower, you can set thesetargets in Column B. If you leave the column blank, you'll only receive alerts once per day.



Price Updates

The price track is now ready to send you alerts. Within few minutes, the other columns inyour spreadsheet would auto-fill with the product details fetched from Amazon. It will havethe full name of the product, the current price and the product availability (stock inventory).

If any product product is out of stock, or if its price cannot fetched (as in the case of Kindlebooks), it would be indicated in the Product Name column. Such products may be removedfrom the sheet.



http://hundredzeros.com/

http://hundredzeros.com/

Limitations

Amazon Price Tracker lets you monitor prices of unlimited number of Amazon products froma Google Spreadsheets. However, Google has set a limit on the number of emails your cansend in the 24 hour period.

For free Gmail accounts, Google allows to send a total of 100 email alerts in a single day. Inthe case of Google Apps for business accounts, the email quota is 1500 email alerts per day.If you try sending emails to more recipients in a day, the script would log an error messageand the email won't go until the quota is reset (this usually happens at 0:00 hours CST).

Also, for best performance, add a maxium of 500-600 Amazon items in a single spreadsheet.You can create more copies of the spreadsheet to track more items.



Troubleshooting

If you get any errors, or if the price tracker has stopped work, you can check the Logs sheetto troubleshoot and find the source of the errors.



Get Going

Here's a sample price alert sent by the tracker. You can always open the GoogleSpreadsheet to add new items or removed existing ones from the watch list. If you ever wishto stop receiving alerts, go the Price Tracker menu in the sheet and choose Uninstall.

You can get the Amazon Price Tracker (premium) from Digital Inspiration. For support,contact Amit Agarwal at [email protected] or tweet @labnol.



http://www.labnol.org/internet/amazon-price-tracker/28156/

http://ctrlq.org/

http://twitter.com/labnol

price alerts for amazon

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