Frequently Asked Questions

Why another price alert service?

The short answer is that nothing out there was exactly what I wanted: a fantastically quick and simple, non-intrusive way of setting an alert while browsing Amazon.

After clicking the Online Price Alert bookmarklet while looking at an Amazon product, I hit submit on the next page without entering any text at all, and that’s it. I don't have to pick a price unless I want something other than my default (90% of the current price), and I don't have to enter my email address or do anything else. The entire process takes less than 5 seconds from start to finish.

Do you support amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, etc.?

Not at this time. At present, we support only the USA Amazon at amazon.com. If you would like to use this service with another Amazon location, please let us know. We will attempt to support any store that has sufficient interest.

I don’t want to give you my email address.

We do not use your email address for anything other than sending you notification if one of your watched items reaches its target price or if the alert expires without reaching its target price. Apart from that, you’ll never hear from us, and we’ll never sell or give your email address to anybody.

If you’re still hesitant to give out your email address, we recommend the excellent spamgourmet service for disposable email addresses that forward to your real email address.

Why do I get an error message about the Amazon URL I’m using?

If you get message saying “provided URL is incorrect,” then the Amazon URL you are using is not the URL of an Amazon item.

Amazon contains many pages, but only pages that are devoted to a single item are valid URLs for creating an alert. Amazon search result pages, wishlist pages, and other non-item pages cannot be used.

The following URLs for Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader illustrate the various formats of a valid item page:

  • http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/
  • http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FI73MA/
  • http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FI73MA/
  • http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000FI73MA/
  • http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000FI73MA/
  • http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA/

Note: your actual item page may have a bunch more stuff after the part illustrated above. That’s fine. We don’t care about the rest of the URL, but you don’t need to trim it. In fact, all we care about is the ASIN, which is the 10-digit code (B000FI73MA in the URLs above). We extract that from the URL, so you can even use just the ASIN.

What does the question mark icon do?

Hovering over a question mark icon — give it a try: — should display a context-sensitive tooltip that explains the link, form field, or button with which the icon is associated. The tooltip functionality requires Javascript to be enabled. If you do not have Javascript enabled, hovering over the icon does nothing.

I have problems generating the bookmarklet.

In order to generate the bookmarklet, you must have Javascript enabled. If clicking the ‘Generate’ button does nothing, you have Javascript disabled (perhaps via Firefox’s NoScript extension) and need to enable it. If you’re sure you have Javascript enabled and are still having problems, please contact us and describe the problem; we’re happy to help.

Please add feature XYZ

Any requests for new features that you’d like to see added to Online Price Alert would be very much appreciated. If there’s some way we can make it easier to use or more convenient, or you wish it did something more, let us know.

How do I cancel an alert?

There is no way to cancel an alert, but all alerts automatically expire after 30 days or as soon as the target price is reached.

I have a question not answered here.

Please contact us and send us your questions. We’ll answer you and add them to this list if they’d be helpful to other people too.