Use Camels to Save Money at Amazon

Camelcamelcamel saved me $100 on my smartphone.

(Would you rather listen to this post? Visit my podcast page and listen to episode #3. It's a podcast version of this post with expanded info.)

I recently decided it was finally time to get a smartphone. My cheap, flip and slide (and dumb) phones have served me well for the past 10 years, but when I heard how cheap data plans are these days, I figured it was time to make the switch.

After much sleuthing on the internet, my smartphone of choice was the Moto G6 (64 GB). It is generally given high marks in many categories, and several websites said it was the best budget smartphone out there.

(To take a look at the Moto G6 on Amazon, click HERE. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Amazon is the only place you can get the 64 GB version, and the listed price was $299. Luckily, Amazon was selling it for only $179. Not one to rush into any purchasing decision,

I put the phone in my shopping cart at Amazon and decided to sleep on it.

The next day, I went to Wal-Mart to examine a Moto G6. It looked pretty slick, and big. “This will do,” I thought.

I went back home, clicked on my shopping cart at Amazon, and almost threw my keyboard across the room when I discovered that Amazon had raised the price of the Moto G6 $120 overnight. While it was sitting in my shopping cart! The new price was $299.

Great phone or not, this was hard to take, knowing that I could have bought it for $179 just 12 hours ago. Maybe Amazon would give me the lower price if I told them they raised the price while it was in my shopping cart.

I called Amazon and pled my case, but they would not adjust the price.

Refusing to give up, I wandered around the internet for a while, certain there was a solution out there somewhere. Eventually I found one. Sort of.

A website with the puzzling name of camelcamelcamel.com provided the answer. This website tracks basically every product for sale at Amazon, and its price history. When I searched for the Moto G6, I saw that it was listed at a significant discount more often than it was listed at regular price.

Confident it would go on sale again soon, I waited. And sure enough, only three days after Amazon raised the price from $179-$299, it lowered the price to $199. It was twenty dollars more than the original sale price, but still a significant discount. I then applied for an Amazon credit card (which I promptly cut into little pieces when it arrived) that gave me another $60 discount.

In the end, I bought my $299 phone for $139, saving $160 (almost 54%). If I had been even more patient, I could have bought it for $119, as camelcamelcamel informed me a few days later that Amazon lowered the price another $20.

The next time you’re going to order something from Amazon, check its price history at camelcamelcamel.com, and exercise some patience! You may save a significant chunk of money by doing so.

This post was originally published in the Springfield Journal-Register (Springfield, Illinois) on July 10, 2019.