Track a price
Paste the address of a product page. If it is something we already record — 482 products so far — you will get its price history in one click. If it is not, an Amazon link becomes a page on the spot; anything else goes into the queue we work through by hand.
Skip the pasting
Drag this to your bookmarks bar. On any retailer’s product page, click it and you land back here with the address already filled in.
It reads one thing — the address in your address bar — and sends it to this form. It cannot read the page, cannot see anything you type, and runs no code of ours on the retailer’s site. That is the whole of it:
javascript:void(location.href='https://www.basketprice.com/track?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))
Retailers we can watch
Amazon. A link to anywhere else cannot be accepted by the form: a new retailer means reading their robots.txt, learning where they publish a price and holding whatever licence covers it, and none of that is a decision a form can make.
What happens next
- An Amazon link is answered at once: we take the product id out of it and ask Amazon’s own API about that product, the same way the six-hourly check does. The address you pasted is never fetched. Listings Amazon records almost no sales for wait for a person, so a no-name listing does not become a page by itself.
- Links to other retailers are accepted by a person first, which is why those are not instant and why the form cannot point our crawler at an arbitrary address.
- From then on the price is checked every six hours. We write it down when it changes, and the first verdict needs a recorded price on ten different days — so it comes as fast as the price moves. A price that holds for two weeks gets an answer of its own sooner: that it has held.
- The record starts the day we start watching. We cannot show you what a product cost last Christmas if we were not recording it last Christmas, and we will not reconstruct one from a retailer’s own claims about its old prices.