How AIPriceHistorytracks and analyzes prices
From searching a product to reading its price rating, here is how the site works step by step, including what the numbers mean and what they leave out.
Search a product or paste a link
Paste an Amazon India or Flipkart product link, or search by product name, brand or keyword. If we already track the product, you go straight to its price history. If it is new to us, we check the store page once, add the product, and start tracking it from that first check.
- Paste a full Amazon or Flipkart link, or a short link like amzn.in or dl.flipkart.com
- Search by product name, brand name or category
- Browse the products we track by category and subcategory
We check the price and save it
Our system visits the public product page regularly and saves the selling price, the MRP shown on the page and whether the product is in stock at that moment. Every check is saved with its date. The product page shows the last checked price, the lowest price we have seen and a chart of all the prices we have saved.
- Most products are checked about once a day. A check can fail or be skipped, so every product page tells you how many days we actually checked
- Each check saves the listed price, the MRP shown on the page and the stock status. We work out the discount ourselves from price and MRP; we never copy the store's discount badge
- Coupons, bank offers, exchange values, delivery charges and personalised prices are not saved
- The chart shows every price we saved during the time we tracked the product
We work out the numbers and rate the price
One calculation turns the saved prices into every figure on the page: the lowest and highest prices, the average and middle price, the usual price range, the recent price changes table and the price rating. The rating compares today's price with all the prices we have seen for that same product.
- Ratings: Good price (today's price is in the cheapest quarter of prices we have seen), Fair price (in the middle half), Expensive (in the dearest quarter), or Not enough data yet
- We give a rating only after at least 45 days of tracking, 30 price checks, three different prices and a check within the last 7 days. Otherwise the page tells you why there is no rating yet
- A one-line reason with the real numbers: in what share of our checks the price was lower, and the lowest and highest we have seen
- A note on how much data we have (plenty, a fair amount, only a little, or not enough) that tells you how many checks and days the rating is based on. It is not a guess about future prices
Set a price alert and explore
If today's price is not low enough for you, set a price alert with the price you want to pay. You can also look at similar products in the same subcategory.
- Set a target price and confirm your email with an OTP
- You get an email after one of our regular checks finds the price at or below your target. A drop that lasts only a few hours between checks can be missed
- Manage your alerts from My alerts after signing in
- Browse similar products in the same category or subcategory
Why check the price history?
Prices on Amazon and Flipkart change all the time: sellers change them automatically, stock runs low, festival sales come and go, and demand goes up and down. Looking only at today's price, or at a "discount off MRP" badge, often hides whether a deal is really good.
AIPriceHistory saves the price of a product every time we check it. By comparing today's price with the lowest, the average and the middle price we have seen, you can tell whether a discount is unusual for that product or whether the price was raised just before a sale. We can only show prices from the time we have been tracking a product, so an even lower price may have existed before that.
How we work out the numbers
Every time our system checks a product page, it saves the price it saw along with the date. Every number and sentence on a product page is worked out from those saved prices by one shared calculation, so the chart, the tables, the summary and the rating always agree with each other:
- Price checks, days we checked and price changes: Each check saves one price. Days on which we did not check are shown as missed, so tracking a product for a long time does not mean we checked it every day. A price change is a check that found a different price from the check before it.
- Lowest and highest price seen: The lowest and highest prices among all our checks, with the dates we saw them. They cover only the time we have tracked the product.
- Average and middle price: The average adds up the price from every check and divides by the number of checks, so periods in which we checked more often count more. The middle price is the one in the middle when all the prices we saw are lined up from lowest to highest; half the checks were above it and half below.
- Different prices seen: How many different prices we have seen. If we have seen fewer than three, the price has not moved enough for a rating.
- Recent changes (7, 30 and 90 days): The percentage change between the first and last price in each period, counted back from our last check rather than from today. If our last check is more than 7 days old, we do not show a recent change.
- Price drops: A fall of at least 2% from the previous check.
- Usual price range: We line up all the prices we have seen from lowest to highest and split them into the cheapest quarter (“great price”), the middle half (“usual price”) and the dearest quarter (“on the higher side”). It is shown only when there is enough history for a rating and the prices are not all bunched at the extremes.
- Price rating and how much data we have: The rating looks at what share of our checks found a lower price than today's. The “how much data we have” note tells you how many checks and days the rating is based on and whether our last check is recent. It describes the past, not the future.
What is left out: Coupon codes, bank offers, exchange values, cashback, delivery charges and personalised checkout discounts are not included because they are different for every customer. Every figure is worked out from prices we actually saw, never estimated. Where we have too little data, we leave the figure out rather than guess.
How we keep the data clean
We check every saved price before using it. A price with no valid date, a date in the future, or a price of zero is left out of every calculation and marked for repair. We work out discount percentages ourselves from the listed price and the MRP shown on the page. If the MRP is lower than the price, or would mean a discount of more than 90%, we treat it as a mistake and show no discount badge. Bad records are marked for repair, never quietly changed.
What we save: The selling price shown on the page, the MRP shown on the page, whether the product was in stock at the time of the check, and the product details we need to match each price to the right product.
What we do not save: Coupon discounts, bank offers, exchange values, seller-specific prices or personalised deals. These are different for every user and cannot be collected reliably.
Start tracking prices now
Search an Amazon India or Flipkart product and see every price we have seen for it.