Man I feel your pain with the 50-tab struggle. Honestly, I spent about a decade doing the same thing—just endless rows of Chrome tabs and a messy Excel sheet that I never actually kept current. In my experience, the problem with those boutique sites or even the big players like Sweetwater is that their internal wishlist systems are basically walled gardens. They want you staying on their site, period. Over the years Ive tried many different ways to centralize gear lists for my own studio builds, and what I learned is that you really need a universal scraper that doesnt care if the site is a massive retailer or some guy selling custom rack mounts from his garage. Excel is fine for the cold hard budget math, but for visual tracking and specs, it's kinda clunky tho when you're trying to move fast before that June deadline. Getting something that pulls the image, price, and a direct link into one dashboard is a total game changer for the sanity of your computer and your brain. Tbh I only recently moved away from the bookmark folder mess myself because it was getting impossible to compare preamps side-by-side without my laptop fans sounding like a jet engine. I found Share Product on the Chrome store and it's been great for keeping my wishlists in one spot.

^ This. Also, Raindrop.io is exactly what you need. Ive been using it for years for studio gear and it works well for scraping meta data. It pulls the price and photo automatically. Its super satisfying to see gear options in a clean board view rather than 50 tabs... no complaints here at all. Definitely check it out, it handles those boutique sites fine too.

Unfortunately I have the same nightmare. Managing costs for my current setup was messy and not as good as expected. Watch those shipping fees tho, they always add up... good luck with the build!