Save Money Shopping on the Internet
Nothing offers a better way to shop than shopping online. It provides a huge number of benefits such as comfort, convenience and can save you money. In today's modern world, many people do not have time to shop in stores due to busy schedules, and online shopping is not always as expensive as many believe it to be. You just have to know what to look for. This article will show you a variety of ways to save money on the internet.
Contents
Steps
- Always try to consolidate your purchases. Make a shopping list then use a search engine that lets you search your entire list for the lowest total price for the entire list. Amazon offers the ability to consolidate purchases at their site, but often the purchases come from different sellers so you actually don't save on shipping charges after all.
- Using online shopping lists with integrated price tracking such as spottster or camelcamelcamel will help you never forget a product or sale again. You simply save products and relax - they will notify you if the price drops or vouchers pop up. Camelcamelcamel is exclusively for Amazon, spottster tracks the prices of 3'000+ shops and is both a browser add on and an app (Android and Apple)
- Another solution is a shopping list search engine which finds the lowest seller of all the items in your shopping list (including of course Amazon), but also obscure sellers which often have really low prices.
- Use sites that will offer you money back in the future such as Ebates.com. This site lets you sign up for free and save between 1% and 25% on many different online merchants (the average saving is 2%-4%).
- Check out coupon sites to see if there are coupon codes available for the website you are trying to use. Unfortunately, many of the "offers" on these sites are just ads for various sales and specials that lead you to a website rather than actually provide a code to save you money.
- Check any Frequent Flyer Programs to see if they allow you to earn miles by shopping online.
- Try searching for the product you are looking for on comparison sites such as Froogle, and Shopping.com, but beware that they do not check every site and will often show you results that do not actually lead to a product, and do not account for shipping charges, which can vary a lot between websites.
- You may want to become a member of free shipping sites, such as FreeShipping.com, which offers free shipping from over 1,000 online merchants. It also allows you to get complete price protection within 90 days and Double Warranty on anything you buy. After the trial, it costs $5.99 per month, billed annually. Deals such as this can save you money long term if planned properly.
- Try ordering catalogs from Catalogs.com, as they sometimes offer exclusive offers that can be used online, as well as customer ID numbers which allow the companies to identify where you got them from which can yield discounts once in a while.
- Consider investing in One time fee or low cost membership programs of various websites to see if you can offset the cost of the membership with saving. A good example of this is the BN Membership program, which for $25 bucks per year, gets you a 10% discount. This is great for avid book reader or movie watchers (since they offer DVDs at great prices) or student who need lots of textbooks.
- Always check eBay for the product(s) that you are looking for, as you can often find unbelievably good deals on new and mint condition stuff.
- Think about getting the credit cards of various stores, sports teams, etc, because they often offer rewards for just signing up and even more rewards for spending as little as $25-$50. Of course, you can cancel if you don't want the extra bills and you can't use or don't want whatever long-term saving it may offer.
- Consider stopping by a local store if an online retailer offers one, for the following reason. If you want something that is not in stock in the store, you can often order it from their website with free shipping. Sears goes even further as to allow customers to order anything from the website with no shipping charges.
- Keep an eye out for seasonal sales and clearance bargains. Even changes within the season allows online merchants to provide clearance and sale offers. Make use of sales, clearances and save a great amount of money.
Tips
- You might want to copy these steps to somewhere where you can check them before buying things online.
- Remember to take your time and don't skip steps that can save you money.
- From time to time many online retailers and stores offers existing customers and their affiliates coupon codes via e-mail that are valid toward discounts on certain products. In order to receive these coupon codes you must be a member of their mailing list or to receive even deeper discounts be a member of their affiliate program. You can save anywhere from 5 - 50% on thing you would buy anyway, so why pay more money?
- Find a site that has up-to-date coupons for various internet retails stores, preferably by category.
Warnings
- If you find a good deal on a website you've never seen before, make sure you can find a customer support phone number that works and an actual address and not just an email.
- Often offers cannot be used together, so you often must choose the one that is best for you.
- Don't buy things because of promises for rebates from shady or homemade looking websites.
- Don't fall victim to impulse buys or things that look too good to be true.
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