For half a year now, I have been using a third-party site (Keepa) to track movie prices on Amazon (and a few other sites), waiting for them to drop to the price I will pay. New movies are often released on physical media at fairly absurd rates. Almost fifty dollars for a new release when it was $17 in the theatre? No thanks! So I wait until they get down into a decent range before I do.
A few nights ago I went to look at the price of a movie and found it higher than my price point. I’m willing to pay $15 for it because it was fairly enjoyable but not an incredible flick. Low-and-behold I see a new feature on the Amazon page! In the screenshot below you will see the ‘Keepa’ injecting a price history which is a neat feature of that third-party site. But over to the right you also see “Add to Auto Buy”:
Clicking that will open a new dialogue window with several settings that control when it will automatically purchase the item for you. You can either auto-purchase or set a reminder for starters, choose your max price, how many of the item, when the rule starts and ends, and limit it by seller.
Note that the ‘max price’ may suggest what seems like an arbitrary price, but it appears to give a few options based on average, historical low price, etc. Once you set your options you create the rule and it takes you to a page with all of your auto-buy options:
That easy and now you can wait for the prices you are willing to pay! While I have all movies above, you can use this feature on every Amazon item I have looked at since noticing the feature. This is the kind of tool that is well-designed and ultimately will be very profitable for Amazon I imagine. Rather than looking at items that are too expensive and later forgetting to keep checking back, this should result in more sales over time.
It’s fun to blog about good new features rather than all the shortcomings on consumer sites and devices!
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