A crossed-out price and a red discount badge tell you almost nothing. The only way to know whether a deal is real is to see what the product actually cost over the past weeks and months. That record is called price history.
How price history is built
A tracker fetches a product page on a schedule — hourly, in a good setup — reads the current price, and stores it with a timestamp. Repeat that for a few weeks and you have a line chart: every rise, every drop, and how long each one lasted. From that you can read the lowest price ever recorded, the typical price, and whether today's number is genuinely unusual.
Three tricks that price history exposes
The inflated reference price
A product sits at €80 for months, is raised to €120 for two weeks, then gets sold at €90 as a "25% off" deal. The discount is measured against a price nobody paid. History shows the €80 baseline immediately.
The permanent sale
Some listings are on sale every single day of the year. If the chart is a flat line at the "discounted" price, that is simply the price, and there is no urgency to buy today.
The pre-event raise
Prices sometimes drift upward in the weeks before a big shopping event, so the event-day discount lands roughly where the price already was. Only history makes that visible.
How to use history before you buy
- Compare with the 90-day average, not with the crossed-out price on the page.
- Look at the all-time low and how often the price approaches it. If it hits that low every few months, waiting costs you nothing.
- Check the shape. Regular sawtooth patterns mean recurring promotions; a steady decline means a product late in its lifecycle, where waiting usually pays.
- Set an alert instead of watching. Decide your target price once, and let a tracker email you if the product reaches it.
Tracking any shop, not just the big ones
Free browser extensions mostly cover a handful of large marketplaces. If you buy from smaller specialist shops — hobby gear, components, niche brands — you will need a tracker that works with any public product URL. PricePulse does that: paste a link, get hourly checks, a full history chart, and an email when the price moves. It starts at €2.99/month with a 7-day free trial.
Selling rather than buying? Read how to monitor competitor prices.