How to set a price alert at your target price
By Webtingle Team · · 11 min readYou already know what you would pay for this thing. The number is in your head, and everything above it is noise you have to sit through. What you do not want is a price alert firing every time the store nudges the number by three dollars, because after the fourth one you stop opening them, and then you miss the one that mattered.
A target changes what the alert is for. Instead of telling you the price moved, it stays quiet until the price reaches somewhere you would actually act. Setting one up takes a couple of minutes. Choosing the number is where people go wrong, and the problem nobody warns you about is that a monitor patiently waiting and a monitor that quietly broke three weeks ago look identical from the outside.
A price drop alert and a price target alert answer different questions
A drop alert tells you the price went down. A target alert tells you it reached the number you would buy at. One of them fires on movement, the other fires on a decision you already made, and that difference decides how often your phone goes off.
If you are shopping loosely, a drop alert is the right tool. You are curious about a category, you want to see movement, and a few false starts cost you nothing but a glance. That case is covered in price drop alerts on any product page, and you can stop here.
A target is for when you have already decided. You know the item, you know your number, and every alert that does not mean "buy now" is an interruption. The distinction matters most on things that move a lot, where a drop alert can fire a dozen times a month and none of those drops gets close to what you were waiting for.
Two filters decide whether your phone buzzes
Between the page changing and your phone lighting up, a change passes through two separate filters that do different jobs. Most confusion about alerts comes from treating them as one thing.
Change Sensitivity runs first. It compares the current capture of the element you are watching against the last one and decides whether anything moved at all. Set to "Any change" it reports every difference. Set to a custom percentage it ignores small ones, which is how you stop an anti-aliased pixel or a shifting badge from counting as news.
The notification condition runs second, on changes that made it past the first filter. This is where your target lives. The monitor reads the change against the sentence you wrote and decides whether this is the change you asked to hear about.
The order is the part worth remembering. A sensitivity set too high never hands anything to the condition, so a perfectly good target sits behind a filter that already threw the change away. If a target has gone silent and you are sure the price moved, check the sensitivity before you rewrite the condition.
Pick the target from the price's floor, not from your hope
The best way to choose a number is to watch the price for a couple of weeks before committing to one. A target invented from what you wish the thing cost tends to fail in one of two directions, and both of them are expensive.
Set it too low and it never fires. You watch the item go out of stock at a price you would happily have paid, having heard nothing, because your number was below anything the retailer was ever going to charge. Set it too high and it fires on the first shallow dip, you buy, and the real markdown lands two weeks later.
Prices give you plenty of material to work from. Alberto Cavallo's NBER research on online competition and pricing found the frequency of price changes at multi-channel retailers rose from 15 percent per month in 2008-10 to almost 30 percent in 2014-17, with the sharpest increase in exactly the sectors where online sellers compete hardest, electronics among them. A price you are watching is very likely to move while you watch it.
So watch first and decide second. Run the monitor with no condition, or a loose one, and let it build a couple of weeks of record. Then read the history of what the price actually did and find the floor: the lowest the number went, and whether it went there once or kept returning. Set your target a little above that floor rather than at it. If the cheapest you saw in a month was 249, a target at 259 catches the next visit to the bottom of the range, and a target at 245 might be waiting for a price that has never existed.
Floors do break. A successor model lands or a clearance run starts, and the price goes under everything you have on record, which makes a target below the observed floor a bet rather than a mistake. It is also the reason to revisit the number instead of leaving it running for a year.
The record answers a second question at the same time: how long the price stays down there. A floor the item sits at for a week is one a daily check will find. A floor it touches for an hour on a Tuesday needs a monitor checking as often as every couple of minutes, or your target is correct and you still hear about it after the price has climbed back.
Writing a condition that holds up
The condition is read as a sentence, so write it the way you would say it to someone standing in front of the page. Four things make the difference between a target that behaves and one that surprises you: name the number and the currency, say which direction you care about, keep it to a single clause, and describe what is visible on the page, because the page is what gets read.
| Vague | Works |
|---|---|
| "let me know about a good deal" | "alert me when the price drops below $249" |
| "when it gets cheap enough to buy" | "alert me only if the price is under 200 EUR" |
| "a big discount" | "alert me when the price falls below 180 and ignore any increase" |
| "under 200, in stock, with free delivery" | "alert me when the price drops below 200" |
That last row is the one people get wrong most often. Stacking three requirements into one sentence gives the condition three chances to disagree with you. Watch the price with one monitor, and if stock matters as much as the number, give it its own monitor and its own sentence.
Point the monitor at the block that holds the price rather than the whole page. A product page carries reviews, recommendation rows and rotating banners that all change on their own, and a monitor watching the lot spends its attention on things you did not ask about. The buy box is usually about the right size, since it moves when the price moves and sits still the rest of the time. The step-by-step of adding a monitor, loading the page and clicking the price is walked through in the price drop alerts guide; everything in this post sits on top of that setup.
A target that never fires looks exactly like a broken monitor
Set a target low enough and you might hear nothing for a month, which is the correct behavior and also completely indistinguishable from a monitor that stopped working. That uncertainty is what kills targets. People give it three silent weeks, decide something must be wrong, and go back to checking the page by hand.
The way out is that a condition silences the alert, not the record. Every change the monitor detects still lands in the history, tagged to show it was seen and judged against your sentence and did not meet it. Silence you can open up and read is a different thing from silence you are guessing about.
That record earns its keep twice. It proves the monitor is alive, and it is also the data you use to revise the number. If the record shows the price bottoming at 270 three times while your target sits at 240, you have learned something an empty inbox was never going to tell you.
When the target does hit, the alert carries the change with it, so you see the new price against the old one before you commit. Nothing switches itself off afterwards. If you bought the thing, turn the monitor off or move it to the next item; if you want to know whether the price keeps falling, leave it running and let the record continue.
Do the retailers not already do this?
Some retailers and marketplace trackers do offer a target price alert, and where they do it well you should use it. Amazon will email you about price drops on wish list items, and the Amazon price-history trackers do the job properly: camelcamelcamel and Keepa both keep long histories and let you set a desired price and wait. For an Amazon purchase they are good tools.
Their coverage is what runs out. Each one is tied to a single marketplace, so a watch on Amazon says nothing about the same item at a specialist retailer, the manufacturer's own store, or the regional chain that undercuts everyone in January. Retailer emails run on the retailer's schedule and batch into digests, and the retailer decides how big a drop is worth telling you about, which means a quiet markdown can pass without a word. On marketplaces the listing you are watching can change seller underneath you, so the price that drops is not always the price you would pay.
The pattern is that these tools watch the store you already committed to. A target is usually a question about a product, and products are sold in more than one place. Putting the same target on each page you would actually buy from is what closes that gap, which means one monitor per page rather than one per product. Three sellers of the same item is three monitors carrying the same sentence, and the first one to cross your number is the one that speaks up.
When the price only appears after a few clicks
Plenty of prices are not on the page when it loads. You have to choose a size, set a delivery location, work through a configurator, or get to the basket before the number you care about shows up. A monitor can record those clicks and inputs and then watch the price that appears at the end, which is covered in monitoring content hidden behind a click. Your target sentence works the same way once the number is on screen.
Targets go stale
A number you chose six months ago is answering a question about a market that has since moved. Three things should send you back to it.
A successor model gets announced, and the floor for the outgoing one resets downward, usually further than you expect. A season ends, and the discount that was aggressive in July is ordinary in September. Or the history simply shows a new floor: the price has been living in a lower band for weeks and your target is now the easy hit it was never meant to be.
The same applies in reverse if you are watching someone else's price rather than shopping. A target phrased as "alert me if their price drops below mine" turns a monitor into a competitive tripwire, and it stays quiet through all the movement that does not cross the line that matters.
Set your number
Watch the price for a couple of weeks before you name a target, set it just above the floor the record shows you rather than the one you were hoping for, write it as a single plain sentence, and route the alert to whichever channel you have connected and will actually read. There is more on that delivery side in how to get notified when a website changes. Then leave it alone. The point of a target is that the next thing you hear is worth hearing.
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