Use CamelCamelCamel to Hunt for the Best Camera Gear Prices on Amazon

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One of the tricky things about online shopping is the price fluctuation that happens for products. The price you see today may not be around when you check again tomorrow. If you regularly shop for camera gear on Amazon, one website that you should bookmark and reference is CamelCamelCamel. It’s a website that tracks the price history of Amazon’s products, allowing you to time your purchases at historically low prices.

The website has a product search engine, but if you have an Amazon product URL, you can copy and paste the address directly into CamelCamelCamel’s search field to bring up that item.

Here’s what the product page looks like for the Nikon D810 DSLR:

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We see that the current price of $2,997 is the best price ever seen on Amazon. The price doesn’t fluctuate much for this camera — there was one big drop from around $3,300 to around $3,000 back in December 2014, but the price has remained very stable aside from that.

Now check out the product pages for the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens and the Nikon Coolpix L330 camera:

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We see that these products fluctuate much more than the Nikon DSLR. The Canon 50mm has actually gone up quite a bit over the past half decade. The lens only cost about $80 to $90 back in 2010, but lately its price has been hovering at around $115.

The Nikon point-and-shoot, which, unlike the Canon lens, is quickly considered outdated within just a few years, has dropped in price from $320 to $138 in less than a year.

If you’d like to know that you’re buying something at historically low prices, just take a look at that chart and see how the current price compares to recent trends.

CamelCamelCamel also includes notification features that can send you alerts when prices drop below a certain threshold you set. The service is completely free, and makes it money from ads and from affiliate revenue when users purchase things on Amazon after clicking links on CamelCamelCamel.

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