The festival season has kicked off in India and it is probably the best time to indulge yourself in online shopping. The biggest online retailers in the country - Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon India - are battling it out with big discounts and rock-bottom prices to bring new customers and also to maximize their share of your pocket.

The biggest online sale ever in India has recently concluded at Flipkart and, despite some technical hiccups, they sold over 2 million items in a single day to 1.5 million people. Impressive. Amazon India is launching a mega sale later this week while Snapdeal is already offering huge discounts on many products in their catalog. All in all, this definitely looks like a good time to open your wallet.

The prices of products at various shopping websites fluctuate frequently and wouldn’t it be useful if there were a mechanism that will alert you when the prices of specific products change. Well, Google Sheets can help here.

Using the Price Tracker - Step by Step

I had earlier written a price tracker for Amazon and the new version includes support for the most popular shopping websites in India. You can now use this Google Sheets based Price Tracker to monitor and compare prices of products on Flipkart, Snapdeal, Infibeam and Amazon India.

The Price Tracker will take no more than a minute to setup. Even my 9 year old son was able to get this up and running on his Chromebook without any external help. He is now using it to track prices of some toys and activity books that he wants me to buy for him this Diwali (better than wasting money on crackers).

1. Click here to copy the Price Tracker Google Sheet in your Google Drive.
2. Put the links (URLs) of one or more products from Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon.in or Infibeam in column A. You’ll have to put the links of individual product pages and not categories or search pages. You can add or remove items from this list later on as well while the Price Tracker is active.
3. Go to the Cell A11 and put your own email address. This is the address where the price alerts will arrive.
4. Open the India Price Tracker menu in the Google sheet (see screenshot) and choose Authorize. Next go to the same menu and choose Start Tracker to begin tracking.

That’s it. You’ll get daily email alerts when the prices of any of these products change. Internally, this tool is screen scraping prices from Flipkart and Snapdeal while in the case of Amazon, it gets the prices through the Amazon API.

Also see: How to Save Money While Shopping Online in India

The tracker runs once every 24 hours but you can always change the frequency manually. Go to the Tools menu in the sheet and choose Script Editor. Go to Resources -> Current Triggers and change the frequency of the trackPrices trigger from daily to hourly.