How to track prices on anything you want to buy
How to track prices on anything you want to buy
You find something you want, but the price isn't right. Maybe it's $30 more than you'd like to pay, or you just have a feeling it'll go on sale soon. So you bookmark it, tell yourself you'll check back later, and then you don't. Two weeks later you remember, and by then the sale already happened.
WishPort's price tracking was built for exactly this situation. You save a product, tell it what price you'd pay, and it emails you when the price drops. That's it. Here's how to set it up.
Step 1: Save the product
Install the browser extension if you haven't already. When you're on a product page, click the WishPort icon. The extension pulls the product name, image, price, and URL automatically. Save it to whichever wishlist makes sense.
The product needs a URL for price tracking to work. If you added a wish manually without a link, tracking won't be available for that item.
Step 2: Turn on price tracking
Open the wish in your WishPort dashboard. You'll see a "Track Price" toggle. Flip it on, and a small settings panel appears with two options:
Alert on any price drop. This is on by default. Any time the price goes down, even by a dollar, you'll get an email. Useful when you just want to know about any movement.
Target price. If you only care about a specific number, type it in. WishPort will ignore small fluctuations and only ping you when the price hits your target or goes below it. The current price shows up right next to the field so you can compare.
You can use both at the same time, or just one. If you set a target price of $50 on an item that currently costs $80, you'll get notified at $79 (because "any drop" is on) and again if it ever hits $50.
Or turn off "any drop" and only get the alert when it crosses your target. Up to you.
Step 3: Wait
This is the easy part. WishPort checks prices every 6 hours. It visits the product page, reads the current price, and compares it against what it saw last time. Every check gets recorded, so you build up a price history over time.
You don't need to do anything. No checking back, no setting reminders. If the price hasn't moved, nothing happens.
Step 4: Get the email
When the price drops, WishPort sends you an email with the old price, the new price, how much you're saving in dollars and as a percentage, and a direct link to the product page so you can buy it before the price goes back up.
There's a 24-hour cooldown between alerts for the same item. If a price drops three times in one day, you'll get one email, not three.
Checking the price history
Every wish with tracking enabled has a price history chart. It shows every price check as a data point on a line graph, so you can see the trend over time. Hover over any point to see the exact price and date.
Below the chart, you'll see stats: the current price, the lowest price recorded, the highest, and the overall change since tracking started. This is useful for figuring out whether a "sale" is actually a good price or just normal fluctuation.
The chart stores the last 100 price checks. At 4 checks per day, that's about 25 days of history.
Managing your alerts
All your active price alerts are listed in one place at Settings > Price Alerts. Each one shows the product name, its current price, your target price (if you set one), whether the alert is active, and when you were last notified.
You can delete alerts from here, or go to any wish and flip the tracking toggle off.
What gets tracked and what doesn't
Price tracking works on any product that has a URL and a detectable price. WishPort uses the same system that extracts product data when you first save a wish, so if the extension was able to find the price when you saved it, tracking will work.
Some things that won't track well: products behind login walls, pages that load prices only after user interaction (like selecting a size first), and URLs that change frequently (like daily deal pages where the URL points to a different product each day).
A few things worth knowing
Prices are checked every 6 hours, not continuously. A flash sale that lasts two hours might get missed. Most sales last longer than that, but it's worth knowing.
If a product page goes down or the price can't be read, the check gets skipped and tries again at the next interval. You won't get a false alert.
Price tracking doesn't cost anything extra. It's part of the free WishPort account.
You can trigger a manual price check from the settings page if you don't want to wait for the next scheduled one. Handy if you know a sale just started.
Getting started
If you already have wishes saved with product URLs, you can turn on tracking right now from your dashboard. If you're new, install the extension, save a few products, and flip the tracking toggle on each one.
For the general case on why price tracking is worth your time, we wrote a separate piece on how wishlist price tracking saves you money.