How to Turn Google Sheets into an Amazon Price Tracker

The prices of products listed on online shopping sites like Amazon vary every single day and Google Docs can help you keep track of these price fluctuations via email. Just put the items that you wish to buy from Amazon in a Google Spreadsheet and it will do the rest. If the price of product drops on Amazon, you get an email alert and will thus never miss that deal again.

Get daily price updates for your favorite products via email

Track Amazon Prices with Google Docs

The Amazon price tracker is easy to configure. All you have to do is add the URLs of product pages that you wish to track inside a Google Spreadsheet. For instance, here’s the product page for iPad and here’s the search page for iPad – you need to put the URL of the product page in the spreadsheet.
The tool can track prices of all products listed on Amazon.com and the various country-specific websites including amazon.fr, amazon.de, amazon.es, amazon.ca, amazon.it, amazon.in, amazon.co.jp and amazon.co.uk.

Here’s how you can set up the price tracker inside Google Docs:

1. Open the Amazon Price Tracker Google Sheet and enter one or more URLs of product pages from Amazon in column B. The sheet has some sample product URLs to get you started.
2. Replace hello@labnol.org in the yellow cell with your own email address. This is where the email alerts will be sent.
3. From the Price Tracker menu, choose the Initialize option and say “Accept” when asked for authorization. The script is open-source and no one else will have access to any of your data.
4. Go to the Price Tracker menu again and this time choose the Start Tracking option. Price tracking is now active, it will run in the background and you may close the Google Sheet.

Add products to this Google Sheet to begin tracking their prices

You’ll get an email within a minute or two listing the current prices of the products that you have added in the Google Sheet. The sheet will then send you a daily email digest (see sample email) of the product whose prices have changed since the last update.

Also, you can add new Amazon URLs, or delete existing products, from the Google sheet and the script will automatically pick the changes in the next run. And if you ever wish to stop receiving those email alerts, just choose the Stop Tracking option from the Price Tracker menu in the same Google sheet.

Update:

Internally, the Google Script uses Amazon’s Product Advertising API to fetch the latest prices of Amazon products. The tool cannot however track prices of Kindle ebooks since Amazon’s API doesn’t offer pricing information for Kindle titles via their API.