How to ensure you never miss a bargain at Amazon
Posted by Huw,
Amazon is a great place to buy LEGO, often at a reduced price. However, the best reductions are often short-lived, not always easy to find at Amazon itself, and may not necessarily be at your local Amazon site.
So, we have provided a number of features here at Brickset to help you identify the best prices and to ensure you never miss a bargain.
Read on to find out about our RSS and Twitter feeds, the Buy pages and the Amazon price comparator.
At the heart of all our tools is the Amazon API which provides a programmatic method to gather information about items for sale at Amazon. Every few hours we use it to get prices from seven Amazon sites: USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
By comparing prices with those obtained earlier in the day we can identify new price reductions and by comparing them to retail prices we can identify percentage discounts.
Looking for a bargain?
When we find new reductions of over 25% below RRP, several things occur:
- A 'Discounts at Amazon.xxx' news article is posted. It lists the latest over 25% reductions and also all of this year's sets that are reduced by 33% or more. By default, articles pertaining to your local Amazon will be shown to you. If you want to see others you can add them (see the tutorial How to change your news preferences).
- The RSS feed is updated. There is an RSS feed for each of the seven Amazon sites. The entire text of the article is posted into the appropriate one. Here is a list of the feeds.
- We will post a tweet. If the new discount is at a UK/European Amazon we will tweet it from @BargainwatchEU; if it is from USA/Canada, from @BargainwatchNA. The tweets contain the top discounts a link to the full list of them. If you prefer, the same information can can be retrieved via RSS: see the bottom of the RSS feed list.
Looking for something that is not discounted?
If you are looking to find out how much a set is at Amazon that does not appear in the discounts lists you will find it in three places:
- In the Buy listings. These lists show everything that is available at a particular Amazon, and can be sorted and filtered. You will find a link to the one for you local Amazon in the green Buy menu, and for other countries below.
- In the Amazon price comparator. This powerful tool shows you, at a glance, the prices of sets at every Amazon. It highlights the cheapest and deepest discounts. It packs in a lot of information so be sure to read the notes at the top of the page so you get the most out of it.
- On set details pages. Click on the Buy tab at the bottom to see prices of the set at each Amazon site.
Handy links
- RSS feed List
- Twitter: @BargainwatchEU, @BargainwatchNA
- Amazon price comparator
- Buy listings:
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de | Amazon.it | Amazon.es
Never pay full price for a retail set again: choose the method that works for you to keep up-to-date with price reductions at Amazon and remember, when you buy anything at all at Amazon via our links, you help fund the site and keep it ad-free for logged in members.
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23 comments on this article
My iPhone tells me "That story is unavailable in The News" when I try to open the Amazon US RSS Feed. Any ideas how to get it to work? Would love to subscribe to notifications.
Thanks!
Are you using a RSS reader? If not you'll need one: https://www.igeeksblog.com/best-rss-reader-apps-for-iphone-ipad/
Any plans on adding Amazon Japan to this? I live in Japan currently and a similar set up for the Japan store would be great.
I think there's something odd about Amazon Japan: I believe you have to be resident there to be an Amazon Associate.
Is it possible to somehow possible to link the amazon bargain post to my wanted list? A link in the news story perhaps, "show me my wanted sets on discount"? I know this is available on each individual set page.
>Huw
Ah I see... you'll see a lot of lego's hit 35 to 40% off here, so for the most part Amazon is the best place to buy, but the prices are very volatile so it's hard to keep track of. Of course, there are times where 40% off is right about at where the US price is to begin with though... Very very over priced here. Especially the Lego Store DC stuff, Death Star is about 86,000 yen, or roughly close to US $900 here...
^^ Yes
http://brickset.com/buy/country-us/vendor-amazon/order-percentdiscount/mycollection-wanted
One day we might get to the point of individually customised alerts based on wanted lists but we are not there yet...
I've used the Amazon discount viewer a lot in the past to buy really cheap sets across any theme, mostly as part packs or gifts for others. But since it got flooded with Dimensions sets, I find myself using it less and less.
It looks like the US Target data isn't coming through any more: http://brickset.com/buy/country-us/vendor-target
Do you have any idea how hard this would be to fix? (It looks like a lot of Amazon's current US bargains are Target price matches, and it can be easier to get them direct.)
^Even then, right now it would be cheaper to get them there, since there is the 5% off as well for those with the Redcard.
This has saved me so much money. The problem I face with it is resisting sets that are heavily discounted, but not in themes I collect! Glad also that Brickset gets a small finder's fee for each purchase. Really a great system!
I suggest the Amazon shopper shows by default those themes that were not excluded in our preference settings, instead of showing all themes. Speaking of that setting, I'd rather prefer it to work the other way round: select the themes one is interested, instead of selecting those not interested. Should make the internal SQL queries simpler, no? Or am I the only one interested in just a handful of Lego themes? :-)
@Michel W
Doesn't it already work like that?
I go to the Amazon page, it shows all themes. Then I can select a single theme I'm interested in and it shows only sets from that theme.
I've found the best thing to do is keep your wishlist up-to-date and then you can just filter the discount page by that. Then you can instantly see the best discounts on everything you're interested in.
That is really useful, but it's still a manual process -- you need to keep checking throughout the day/week. Going off what others said, it would really be awesome if you could flag a set and get an email/text when it's discounted over a certain percentage or dollar amount that you specify (e.g. notify me when the Ghostbusters Firehouse is discounted over 5%, or when it's discounted below $330.00).
This would be helpful because, as the article says, often the discounts are very short lived. I used Ghostbusters Firehouse as the example because I saw it on sale for $320 the other day (I already have it), but apparently that didn't last long -- maybe just a few hours. The site camelcamelcamel.com tracks Amazon price histories but doesn't even show that dip. I don't know how often they re-check (daily, maybe?).
So even though there are other sites where you can sign up for such alerts, it would be much nicer to have it integrated in Brickset in conjunction with the wishlist I already use. Plus, you may be able to index everything more often because we're only dealing with LEGO and not millions of different items.
EDIT: I'm just realizing that deal may have been a 3rd party sale on Amazon. So it might be worth an option for whether you include 3rd party prices or not. But I think the rest of my point still stands.
@paulmison, correct. The Target data feed no longer includes LEGO items. I am trying to find out why.
@Michel W, that's a good idea. Query wise it makes no difference (IN (..) vs. NOT IN (...) and the reason you have to select themes you are NOT interested in is because you'd never see new themes otherwise.
Email alerts is something I do plan to add: it's just a case of working out the most efficient way to do so.
@Huw thanks for the update. Hopefully Target will fix it on their end and you won't need to change anything.
There anyway you can get the name of the marketplace seller via Amazon's API? Amazon warehouse deals offer some great discounts for what is most of the time a damaged box, and from how I see it they show as a separate seller on the Marketplace, some way to monitor these sets would be cool
How dopey am I?!? Excluding a theme, eg. Dimensions, excludes it from the Amazon buy page too.... I'll get me coat...
I'm told that toys are non-commissionable at Target now so unfortunately I won't be able to display them :-(
> CloudV
Totally agree. The prices on Amazon Japan are volatile beyond belief. Several dollars up or down within hours in some cases.
Really the best way to know is to let them send you e-mails. I tried their subscription services but they really don't offer much by way of sales on toys and hobbies where you can specifically target LEGO.
The only tip I have is if you want it on the cheap never buy anything there day 1 release wait about 7 months. Wave one Stars FO for example is now a bit cheaper than NA original retail or about equal but it took a year for prices to drop to those levels ><
Whilst here in New Zealand you could just wait for an unsuspecting retail head office employee to accidentally post crazy (and surely inaccurate) "one day only" and "online only" prices on a wave of latest sets. Net result was that some sets were reduced from their RRP of $219.99 to $30, yes that's correct: $30 and some from $169.99 to $10... Orders online were showing as sold out almost immediately (I'm waiting to see if the retailer honours them) but that's only half the story as screenshots of the online deals also stated that you needed to check in store if out of stock and that the deals lasted to either 14th or 15th of November. Many stores in the huge national chain honoured the deals even up to closing on the 15th. They would have lost tens if not hundreds of thousands...
One note I'd like to add:
If the discount is high, always check if the seller is trustworthy. I admit I failed to pay attention once, and, thinking I had a good deal, I got taken advantage of.
Thanks for posting this, Brickset keeps getting better and better!!!