Amazon’s Rufus AI is pretty terrible, but they got one thing right, 30 and 90-day price history for everything I checked.
For many products there’s a “price history” link right under the price.
For others, click on “ask something else” and ask for the price history.
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It will only give you 30 or 90 day price history, and will spit out some text about the lowest point, high, and maybe median.
Here’s what the 30-day price history looks like for the Irwin lifting clamp.
And here’s the 90-day price history.
Other 3rd party sites have far longer pricing history datapoints.
I checked this 14pc set of Dewalt drill bits.
Frankly, I think these charts are very useful.
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I wonder what else the Amazon Rufus can do.
Where is this manufactured?
The product information for the IRWIN Quick-Lift Construction Jack doesn’t include a specific country of manufacture in the available details. It’s manufactured by IRWIN and made from alloy steel, but the exact manufacturing location isn’t listed in the product specifications.
For detailed country-of-origin information, I’d recommend checking the product packaging or contacting IRWIN’s customer service directly.
Oh well.
It will also say things like:
While the product specifications mention “compatible with vehicle type,” this refers to its universal design for various construction applications—not automotive use.
It offers to compare the lifting clamp to Dewalt’s.
IRWIN: 10″ lifting height, 330 lbs capacity, precision controlled lowering
DEWALT: 8.75″ lifting height, 340 lbs capacity, compact design with lifetime warranty
Bottom Line: Both offer excellent build quality from trusted tool brands. IRWIN provides greater lifting height and precision control, while DEWALT offers slightly more capacity and lifetime warranty coverage. For most construction tasks, either would serve you well.
This completely misses the main feature differences.
The Dewalt activation lever faces up, which means you can easily tap it with your foot. You can’t do that with the Irwin.
This seems to be a cost-cutting or differentiation mechanism, but it’s undoubtedly a significant difference.
Thus, I maintain that Amazon’s Rufus AI is generally useless, except for the price history feature.
JMJR
I hope this doesn’t mean Amazon is going to remove the Keepa plug-ins functionality, because I use it all the time to make sure I’m not buying at inflated prices.
Adam
I wouldn’t see why not. They are just pulling the price and making their own charts, ones that go much further back in time.
Pablo
CamelCamelCamel.com also has a pretty good price history tool too.
John
Exactly, camelcamelcamel.com has been around for 18 years.
Scott K
Huge fan of this. I have a big wishlist that I synced with Camel to get email alerts below a certain price point. I’ve gotten some really good deals this way.
Bonnie
I actually trust their data too. There’s no reason to believe Amazon or their AI is being truthful.
Vards Uzvards
In the last 3-4 weeks I was looking at these 3M safety glasses
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007JZ3U6K
and I can attest that CamelCamelCamel provides much more accurate price history compared with the Price History shown on the Amazon.com product page.
LGonToolGuy'd
Facts.
ebt
Always used Camelcamelcamel. Also liked ReviewMeta but ever since they shutdown, I now never rely solely on reviews.
Matt S.
Lately I’ve had issues with Camel not pulling history for a good number of items I’m looking at. It says no amazon history available, ot the part isn’t available… while I’m looking at the item in stock at amazon from another tab! I do use the alerts frequently and it’s saved me a TON on items I was going to buy, but didn’t need immediatley.
David F Ritter
Now if they would allow me to place a limit order on an item…
Stuart
Ooh. That’d be a great AI ordering feature.
HmmmDusty
I wonder how would that work though with more than a few people using it, and stock being lower than the number of people who are using the feature. Alphabetically? Chronologically? By age or level of Amazon account? Randomly?
Rick
Placing a limit order on something has nothing to do with AI.
Investors were placing limit orders for stocks online 25 years ago, long before AI was being promoted as the solution for everything.
Jared
Like “order when the price is X or lower”? I would LOVE that.
Bob
This is an option if you ask Rufus to set a price alert.
Frank
or ask it to buy it for you
MI Dad
Yeah, I did this for a pair of earbuds a while ago. Tell it your threshold and whether you want it to purchase it automatically or simply email/alert you. I was thrilled this feature exists!
Jared
I had no idea!
Andy
AI isn’t know for absolute accuracy.
Has anyone validated the price history information that Rufus provided against other sources of the same info like CamelCamelCamel? It wouldn’t surprise me if Rufus is making some of the data up.
Blocky
In my limited cross checking, I have found camels to provide different and more thorough information. I wouldn’t say Rufus is making things up necessarily, but it provides less insight. If I’m actually curious, I open a new tab.
Camels isn’t perfect either. When I shop more esoteric items, there is definitely less sample data, as I have observed inconsistencies.
Jared
Rufus is terrible. It’s now just an extra step I have to complete to search the customer Q&A. I’ve never, not once, had it given me the information I was looking for. Frankly I don’t understand how it could be that bad.
Will
Much prefer Keepa or three camels. I don’t trust Amazon Ai to be accurate or honest.
Troy
Definitely this, and Keepa has *way* more data available over a *much* longer period of time than 90 days
Evan
That’s an odd way to implement this feature. The price history data is not at all tied to an AI model — it’s just regular data retrieved from a database somewhere. It’s no more unique than the current product price, review numbers, item descriptions, etc. They could very easily have the “Price history” button open a normal chart on the page, opening the Rufus pane is entirely unnecessary.
I work in the tech industry and I would guess (based on the kinds of thing I’ve heard from friends who work at Amazon) that some project team is trying to drive user adoption of Rufus and this is a good way to juice the numbers.
Aram
I also know people in Amazon and yeah, this was almost certainly a way for two different teams to get a win — the people who made the tracker now get to say they used AI (execs love that), and the AI people are almost certainly hoping to pump their numbers.
…to be clear, I don’t personally know anyone on these specific teams, but the “use AI or else!” thing is real, at least in other areas at Amazon and I don’t know why these folks would have been immune to the threat.
Rick
“The price history data is not at all tied to an AI model — it’s just regular data retrieved from a database somewhere.”
Thank you for that. There is a general trend throughout print media for so many things to be reflexively attributed to AI without foundation.
Stuart
There are 2 ways to get Amazon pricing data.
i) Amazon has historical pricing data that they (to my knowledge) have never displayed outside of this new Rufus AI feature.
ii) 3rd party services can can pull and log real-time pricing from Amazon’s affiliate API.
Amazon’s Rufus AI accesses the historical pricing data, plots in on a chart, and then offers some basic interpretative commentary based on the chart. The tone of the commentary tends to be neutral or encouraging, e.g. “the price is higher than their low, but still $x lower than the list/peak/recent price .”
Farmerguy
I wonder if the number of clicks on price tracker will be a data point for Amazon’s pricing algorithm to determine price consciousness on an item and then limit price discounts or inversely flash sales (or make the data appear the current price is a discount).
MI Dad
I agree this is a helpful feature, but it is important to remember that Amazon controls the data that is presented. That said, I’ve found it to be accurate/honest thus far.
It was particularly useful leading up to the Christmas holiday, as you could go back 90 days, which covered the October Prime Day sale. Knowing whether I was getting a “good” deal or not was very handy indeed!
ElectroAtletico
Reminds me of “HAZARDFRAUGHT” the outstanding site that tracks the history of Harbor Freight products/pricing.
Anson
I was not aware there was a camel style website for harbor freight. Thank you.
Jordan
“AI” slop being used in places where it’s 100% not needed — like reading pricing information from a database. It’s like cutting down a tree with a very expensive boutique pocketknife instead of a chainsaw. Very expensive, resource intensive, and not as good as other solutions.
Other solutions like CamelCamelCamel. Been using that for over a decade, and it’s a FAR better price tracker and comparison tool than scAmazon’s slop.
MM
That’s a great point. There is zero reason for a price tracking tool to involve AI. It’s just a database of historical data. If they are using AI it’s a very silly use of the technology–extremely resource intensive and offers no benefits over a simple database search.
Perhaps they are using AI to identify which products to log for this tool? If so, I would expect all sorts of problems. Fore example late last year I bought a pair of Bessey K-body Revo clamps on Amazon for $50, yet Amazon had flagged the listing as “higher price than normal”. The site apparently didn’t understand that the listing was for two products. Had the price been for one clamp then yes, it would have been higher than usual. But two clamps for that price was an incredible deal. If this is the kind of thing they are using AI for then I’d expect more of that kind of error.
Scott K
As mentioned above, this is likely an attempt to force the adoption of their AI tool. I also think there are a lot of instances of the AI label being slapped on things that aren’t really using AI the way we think of it. Many search tools were already capable guiding me to what I want despite typos and vague search terms.
Rick
I don’t think Amazon is directly trying to “force us to adopt their AI tool”. Instead, they are trying to induce customers to login to their Amazon accounts in order to use the price history feature, which is not shown (for me at least) without being logged in.
Customers think that they are tracking prices, but the underlying story is that Amazon is tracking them. They are tracking WHO is tracking prices, and for WHAT products. That is valuable data for them when setting prices.
And as with some other online resellers, there is a general trend for Amazon to increasingly limit functionality unless customers login to their account. For example, when reviewing comments for products, or trying to add certain products on sale to the cart. They are doing that for their benefit, not yours.
Brent
About the only place I have found AI useful in Shopping is figuring out the acronyms that a product using in it description for ski boots at Evo.com