Last year I relied very heavily upon Amazon.com for my Christmas shopping. And now that we’ve signed up for Amazon Prime, I’m relying on them even more heavily this year. The combination of convenience, generally low prices, and their price drop guarantee is pretty hard to resist.

But wait… It gets better! If you hop on over to PriceProtectr, you can create an account (this only takes about a minute) and then let them monitor the prices of items that you’ve purchased. Entering items is dead easy — simply paste in a link to the item and hit submit. They’ll fetch the item info and price for you and then all you have to do is click a button to confirm. That’s it. If the price drops, they’ll shoot you an e-mail and you can head over to the Returns and Refunds Contact Form to request a credit.

While I’m primarily using this for purchases from Amazon.com, PriceProtectr actually supports over 70 different merchants. In fact, I also loaded our new Sear Kenmore vacuum cleaner into their system in hopes of getting an even better deal.

So how much have I saved thus far? Well, I only started my Christmas shopping (and using PriceProtectr) at the end of last week, and I’ve been buying mostly low-dollar (and pretty popular) items, but… I’ve already saved a total of $12.48. Here’s the breakdown:

Nikon Coolpix L11 — three price drops totalling $7.00
Force Action Light Saber — One price drop of $3.55
Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 QuietPoint Headphones — Two prices drops totalling $1.93

The latter item wasn’t actually a Christmas present — rather, I recently bought this for myself for use on long flights.

Note that really small price decreases might not actually be worth chasing down. That being said, the e-mail notification contains a link to the Amazon contact page, and you can simply check a box alongside the item whose price has dropped. I also have a boilerplate refund request letter than I can pull up with a keystroke. Thus, it takes me less than a minute to submit the request. Here’s what I send:

The price on this item has decreased to $XXX.XX. I am thus requesting a price adjustment commensurate with this decrease.

But if you’re not interested in such small you price changes, you can check a box to stop PriceProtectr from notifying you about priced drops of less than a dollar.

All in all, I’d have to say that PriceProtectr is a very useful service, and I highly recommend it to everyone. I can see it being even more valuable if you’re buying high end items, as the potential price drops (in terms of dollar amounts) are likely to be substantially greater than what I’ve been seeing.