Like it or not, the holiday shopping season is almost upon us. That means jostling for parking spots and dealing with some of the worst aspects of human nature. Or does it? There is, in fact, a better way. And it'll save you money and some sanity.
Our first piece of advice? Stick with Amazon. It has pretty much everything, and if you spend more than $25, you get free shipping. Even better, you can use the online retailer in conjunction with a price-tracking site like camelcamelcamel to carefully monitor the prices of the gifts you intend to buy. The service even graphs an object's price history. That's a good indicator of what time of year, or even day of the week an item might drop in price.
You'll want to start cultivating those shopping lists now, by the way. Waiting a few weeks only reduces the chances you'll find a deal. If something is in short supply - as things often are during the holiday shopping season - you'll also run the risk of your item not shipping before the holidays. To get things started, you'll want to create one or more Wish Lists on Amazon.com. When you log into your Amazon account, direct your attention to the far right side of the menu bar and click on Wish List. Select 'Create Wish List' from the drop down and name it. Now, when you find items that are worthy of your friends and family on the site, simply add them to the list.
The next step is really about knowing when to pull the trigger. Head to price-tracking site camelcamelcamel and set up an account. The site's import wishlists tool will start checking the prices on all the items you've placed into your Amazon Wish List. Just paste the Wish List's URL into the tool and determine if you want the items from Amazon or third party or both.
Be sure to adjust the 'Desired Prices' setting. This is where you dial in how much an item's price has to drop before triggering an alert. Set it to the 'Current Price,' then (-) and set a price drop amount. If you have a bunch of big ticket items, the drop should be more substantial to get your attention. Lower ticket items should have a smaller drop.
If needed, create two lists. One for the expensive items where a $20 drop is a big deal. And one for cheaper items where a $3 drop is enough to bust out the credit card.
Finally, click 'Add Wish List' and wait for camelcamelcamel to align all the zeros and ones while it processes yours. Now you'll be alerted via email when an item on your list drops to or below the amount you specified.
Unfortunately, many of the price drops you will see are only temporary. They could be gone within hours and if you're not the type to check email every 15 minutes, you could miss a sweet deal. Thankfully with IFTTT (If This Than That) and camelcamelcamel's RSS feed you can get a text message when something falls below your set price alert.
Camelcamelcamel creates an RSS feed of alerts. To get to this feed, head back to the Wish List page by hovering over your account screen name in the top right hand corner. Click on RSS Feed. Copy the URL of the feed and head to IFTTT.
If you've never used IFTTT you're missing out. The site links services like Twitter, RSS, Flickr, and others together in automated tasks. Want email yourself all of your tweets? You can do that. Want to send your send YouTube videos you favorite automatically to your Tumblr? You can do that too. In fact, of the tasks available on IFFT, sending an RSS update as a text message is pretty simple and someone's already done all the hard work for you.
After signing in or signing up for IFTTT, be sure to turn on SMS access. Head to the Channels page and if SMS is greyed out, it needs to be activated. Click to activate and you'll be asked to add your number. Once IFFT determines that it's actually your number by sending you an authorization text, you'll ready to start getting texts about discounted Wish List items.
Head to the RSS to SMS recipe. Paste the Wishlist RSS Feed from camelcamelcamel into the Feed URL text box. Click on Use Recipe and now whenever an item in your Amazon Wish List drops in price by a pre-determined amount, you'll get a text.
That should give you enough time to buy the item before it increases in price. With all the money you'll save, you can really splurge on the only thing that doesn't create stress during the holidays: Egg nog.
Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering cord-cutting, e-readers, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.
Read more by Roberto Baldwin
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