I hate to admit it, but I’m an impulse buyer, with closets full of little electronic gadgets to prove it. Shopping events like Amazon Prime Day are bad for me. Even though I know Amazon is using all kinds of manipulation techniques to get me to buy things I don’t need, it still works—I made an Amazon impulse purchase while researching an article about how you shouldn’t impulse buy on Amazon. But this year, I’m going to resist my worst impulses by setting my own prices, and only choosing things I already wanted to buy before Amazon’s big day.
How to “set your own prices” on Amazon
Obviously you can’t make Amazon lower its prices at your whim, but you can set up an alert system to let you know if anything you want to buy dips in price enough for it to make sense for you to purchase it. It’s easy to do, too. Below is a step-by-step guide to setting your own personal maximum price for any item sold by Amazon:
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Identify the items you’d like to purchase and throw them into your Amazon wishlist. Make sure your wishlist is set to “public.”
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Visit the Amazon price tracking website CamelCamelCamel and make a free account. There are other price-tracking apps and websites that, more or less, do the same thing—Slick Deals, Honey, Keepa, etc.—so check out our overview of the best price-tracking tools.
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Click “import wishlist.” (You’ll have to copy and paste the URL from your Amazon wishlist.)
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Once you’ve done that, CamelCamelCamel lets you add specific maximum prices (or percentage drops) for everything in your wishlist. Enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each item in your list, and then you can tell it to send you an email when any item’s price drops to your set spending limit.
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Ignore all the Prime Big Deal Days hype and wait for the email alert letting you know that your chosen items have become cheap enough for you to buy.
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Spend the day feeling smug and agree with yourself that you actually are the smartest person alive. Don’t even look at Amazon’s website. Seriously. Well, maybe just for a second. This time you’ll have the will power to avoid buying another chocolate fountain or a self-stirring mug with “SELF STIRRING MUG” written on the side, right?
More ideas for imposing limits on your spending
If you want to take tech-based shopping guardrails beyond the basic “time to buy” alert system described above, here are some ideas.
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Block ads: If you’re the type of person who responds to online ads, you can block a ton of them with a simple tool or app. Here’s our overview of the best ad-blocking software.
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Track your expenses: Whether you do it with pencil and paper or use an app, seeing how much you’re spending can be a powerful motivation to be more thrifty.
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Save up for something: Saving up for something in the future—a vacation, an electric surfboard, whatever—can make it easier to resist spending now.
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Hit your internal pause button: If you can make a habit of waiting a day or two between thinking “I want those sunglasses” and entering your credit card numbers, you may decide your old sunglasses are just fine.
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Consider professional help: It’s normal and common to sometimes have a little difficulty controlling spending, but researchers say about 6% of Americans suffer from compulsive buying disorder which may be part of a larger psychological problem. So if your spending is driving you deep into debt, you’re suffering real-world consequences based on your buying habits, or you just feel like shopping might be a problem for you, talk to a professional.
