Track product price trends with Gazaro

Say you're getting set to do your part to fight the recession and spend some money on a tech product like a new laptop or a TV. Sure it's great to stimulate the economy, but you still want a good deal, right?

You can comparison shop from one retail outlet to another to find the lowest price, but that only covers one side of the equation: What if the price is likely to fall in the future? A good deal now may be a much better deal tomorrow -- or a bad one.

Enter Gazaro, a new website that keeps tabs on product prices over time, ranking them to tell you whether, in a historical context, the current price is low or high.

To use the service, just type a product's model number (only electronics are supported right now) into the search box at the bottom of the screen. You'll get a summary of the product and a sense for how good a deal it is. For example, this Samsung TV looks like a great deal (over $800 off its list price), but if you look at the chart you'll see that's largely been the norm for the price for the last few months. It scores a 5.1 from Gazaro -- representing a merely average trend and not really a great deal.

A better buy might be this Samsung, which just received a big price cut and scores a 9.1 on Gazaro's trend ranking, indicating a much better deal vs. its historic cost. (Note: These are just random examples; I'm not suggesting you buy either of these TVs.)

The only big problem with the site -- aside from the fact that it's in beta and still limited in the amount of data it's collecting -- is that the same product regularly shows up several times in the database, once for each retailer, instead of lumping them all into one view, which makes it hard to use Gazaro to comparison shop between stores. Gazaro does compare prices from store to store as part of its deal score ranking, but the data can be hit and miss due to the vagaries of product naming systems and conventions from one retailer to the next.

Still: Very neat idea, and it's one more great tool to have in your arsenal next time you're shopping for a big-ticket item.

For a similar idea in the realm of airline prices, check out Farecast.