Before buying anything on Amazon, use these 2 tools to make sure you’re getting a good deal

Amazon brown box
REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Amazon's Prime Day event is nearly here, which means it's time for the online shopping giant to bombard Prime members — and coax other shoppers into becoming Prime members — with the promise of widespread discounts and special offers.

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The event is expected to generate lots of sales for Amazon. The last Prime Day was a success, and the company has gained millions more Prime members in the year since. 

The urge to shop on Prime Day makes sense: Amazon sells a ton of products and makes it very easy to buy them. Many times, its products are less expensive than they are elsewhere.

But that's not always the case. Though Amazon's shopping experience is largely straightforward, certain aspects of it can still be misleading.

Thankfully, there are tried-and-true ways to ensure you're getting a good deal. Let's talk about two: using a price tracking tool like Camelcamelcamel, and trying a user-reviews analyzer like Fakespot.

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Finding a good deal

The first tool is pretty straightforward. Camelcamelcamel is one of many product price trackers floating around the web, but it has been popular and reliable for the better part of a decade.

To use it, simply copy and paste the URL of whatever item you're considering into the bar at the top of Camelcamelcamel's site. The tool will then bring up a chart of how that item's price has fluctuated over time.

For instance, Amazon is promoting this Anker battery pack for $35 as of this writing. Anker is a trusted name, and Amazon's listing says this is a $45 savings off of the battery's usual list price. Looks like a no-brainer, right?

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Screen_Shot_2017 07 10_at_4_53_58_PM
Jeff Dunn/Screenshot

Not necessarily.

Throw the link into CCC and you'll see the battery has been sold around the $35 mark many times in the past. At some points, it's been a few bucks cheaper. Typically, Amazon sells it for around $40. So you're maybe saving about $5, not $45.

That's not terrible, but on a day like Prime Day, when Amazon tries to overwhelm shoppers with purported savings, it probably isn't the impulse buy it first appears to be.

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What the battery's price history looks like. Jeff Dunn/Screenshot

There are more egregious examples. To be clear, Amazon is home to many legitimate bargains, and that will extend to Prime Day to an extent. But the company's status as the best place to shop can sometimes be overblown.

As with any other retailer, the vast majority of its "deals" aren't exactly deals. Last Prime Day, for instance, buying guide site The Wirecutter scanned nearly 8,000 advertised deals and found only 64 to be worth buying. (Dedicated curation sites like that or Slickdeals are another good resource during an event like Prime Day.)

This is all to remind you that retailers aren't charities. While it's not perfect — Amazon has prevented certain products from being price-tracked in the past — a tool like CCC or the browser extension Keepa provides the context that Amazon often withholds. That they let you create price watch lists only helps.

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Weeding out shoddy reviews

A reviews analyzer like Fakespot or ReviewMeta isn't as plainly beneficial as CCC, but it's still a good thing to keep tabs on.

The literary masterpieces known as Amazon user reviews aren't always forthright. There's the inherent shakiness of the user-solicited Amazon Vine program, for one, but it's also not uncommon for a company to outright fake batches of glowing reviews to boost a product's appeal. Amazon has fought this for a long time and is getting better about it, to be fair.

But the idea with these kind of sites is to quickly get a sense of just how genuine those reviews are. Again, all you have to do is paste a link; Fakespot, ReviewMeta, or whatever else will then analyze the product's user reviews and grade them on their trustworthiness.

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Screen Shot 2017 07 10 at 5.20.46 PM
Regardless of how good the battery is, it seems generally safe to say Anker hasn't been paying people to build up its Amazon rating. Jeff Dunn/Screenshot

Naturally, it's harder for something like this to be foolproof.

Fakespot, for instance, says it primarily judges a review's authenticity on "the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer, correlation with other reviewers' data, and a machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent reviews," but sometimes people with poor English are just excited about a thing. 

Nevertheless, if you're on the fence about a certain product, especially if it comes from a brand you don't know, it's always good to be safe. This helps with that.

The next time you find a deal that seems too good to be true, just know that it actually might be.

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