Do you consider yourself a clever online shopper?
I’m guessing you have the basics down, like using Amazon Prime to save on shipping, snagging discount codes from time to time to knock a few bucks off your shopping cart - you know, the usual.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with those things at all. They’re admirable.
But here’s what you probably didn’t know you were missing when you’ve been shopping online:
There are a handful of easy tricks - tricks you probably haven’t been using - that can save you a lot of money and time shopping online.
No more small-time discounts and hoping you’re getting the lowest price.
I’m talking “best-deal-ever” - retailers hate to see you coming - type of online shopping.
See, there are little hidden online shopping hacks most people don’t know about (or think about).
You don’t have to be over-the-top or spend a ton of time to do these things. They aren’t even really hidden, but they aren’t exactly advertised by online retailers either.
They’re kind of a pain to find one-by-one, so most people never bother putting in the time to find them.
Luckily for you, we’ve compiled a list of 15 online shopping hacks that will save you time and money and put you in the online-shopping big leagues.
Trying to find the lowest price on an item online is one of the most frustrating things about shopping online. You know you have unlimited access to the world’s retailers, but how in the world do you find the best deals on a particular item?
The answer: Use Price Grabber or Yahoo Shopping.
Let’s start with Price Grabber.
Head over to Pricegrabber.com, type in a search query, and you’ll see a list of the best-priced items that match your search term from across the web.
You’ll see that you can sort by popularity, price, and rating, and you can choose between a grid or list view. Sometimes it might freeze on you while trying to load, but just click the search symbol again and it should reload fine.
You’ll probably notice that a lot of the results come from Amazon for most items, but this is an extremely handy tool to use when trying to make sure you’re getting the best deal on a particular item you’re searching for.
Another place to look is Yahoo Shopping.
Head over to shopping.yahoo.com, and just type in what you’re looking for. You’ll get a list similar to Price Grabber, and you’ll also see a price filter on the left-hand side so you can find the best deal.
You’ll have to balance price with quality, but these two sites are great for getting a “bird’s eye view” of a particular category or search term without having to bounce around from website to website.
Have you ever been looking around online and found an item you really wanted, but just weren’t ready to spend the money to buy it full-price quite yet? Then Slickdeals and Shoptagr are perfect tools for you.
Each one of these sites send you notifications whenever products you’re interested in go on sale, so you only pay when the price is hot.
Hover over Deals in the top navigation, then hover over Deal Alerts, then click Create.
Type in a keyword and click Create Deal Alert. You’ll have to create an account, and once you confirm your email address and activate your account, you can hover over Deals, then hover over Deal Alerts, and this time click Manage Deal Alerts.
You should see the deal alert you just created. You can also click Edit to make changes to your Deal Alert. The main thing you may want to adjust is the Rating, which is essentially how popular a particular deal is.
Shoptagr works as a browser extension or as a manual app for saving items you find online and getting notified when the price drops a certain percentage.
You could install their browser extension (they walk you through how to do it and it’s very simple using Google Chrome browser), which allows you to save items as you shop online.
You can also you their website to simply add items by adding the URL of the product you want to save.
If you use the website to type or paste in the URL of a product, once you save an item you should be able to click My Items in the top navigation, then click the product you just saved in order to adjust the notification settings. You can choose Any price change, 25% off, or 50% off.
Have you ever spent time looking for coupon codes all across the web, only to find out they’re expired or were never good in the first place? Well Dealspotr solves those problems.
Dealspotr is the largest and most accurate coupon code database online, so you can rest assured that the time you spend browsing through the large database of coupons will actually save you time and money.
Have you ever gotten a gift card you have absolutely no interest in using? The good news is, you’re not the only one. And you can use that to your advantage whenever you’re shopping online.
Basically, when people get gift cards they don’t want, they use sites like GiftCardGranny, Cardpool, and Raise to sell them for cash.
You can start out by checking out the featured deals on each site, or by searching for a specific brand name.
Most larger online retailers today have what’s called “retargeting” ads setup, which basically means they are paying to advertise to you on sites like Facebook, Google, and others, based on your activity on their website.
Not only can they serve advertisements to you based on whether or not you’ve been to their website, but most of them target specific ads to people who leave items in their shopping carts and leave without buying them.
These ads can often include discounts on the very items you left in your shopping cart, to serve as incentive to get you to go ahead and buy while you’re apparently interested.
6. Buy filler items to reach your free shipping threshold (Amazon Filler when shopping on Amazon)
If you need to hit the $25 purchase minimum in order to receive free shipping on Amazon, try “amazon filler items” and you’ll see a few good sites that help you find good items to fill out your order with useful stuff that qualifies for free shipping.
Promotional email lists have gotten a bad reputation as “spam” over time, but the reality is, promotional emails serve to send you discounts. As long as it’s something you’re actually interested in buying, join as many email lists as you can in order to get great insider deals.
Sierra Trading Post is a great example of an email list worth joining. With regular deals offering up to 80% off select items, what’s there to lose?
That’s right, there is actually an ideal time to shop online. Most people have more free time on the weekend, so it only follows that more people will be online shopping during the weekend.
With that in mind, it makes sense for businesses to push out more specials and promos during the week in order to drive business during slightly slower times.
Use that to your advantage by shopping more during the week in order to take advantage of more promotions.
One cool benefit of using technology and social media to shop online is the fact that customer service representatives are literally at your fingertips.
But online customer service reps aren’t like in-store associates. Online representatives typically have one goal in mind: to keep you happy.
So if you come right out and simply ask for a discount on a particular item, you might be surprised by how often you get what you ask for.
Most email services make it fairly simple to setup a filter for incoming mail. To keep your emails better organized, and to make sure important discounts aren’t passing you by, you can create a folder specifically for promotional emails, and have emails automatically go to that folder if they:
Are from a specific email address
Include the words “% off”, “discount”, etc.
Of course, if you don’t want to worry with setting up a special folder and an email filter to organize your favorite promotional emails, it may be easier to simply create a dummy email address specifically for promo emails.
PriceBlink and Honey are both browser extensions that help save you money as you shop. You can go to a site and these extensions will automatically tell you if there are any coupon codes available on the site at that time. They’ll even tell you if/where you can find a lower price on the item you’re looking at.
DealSquad is similar to a service that helps find the lowest price on a particular item. You just paste in the URL of the item you want to find the lowest price on, and they literally assign an individual to the task of finding the lowest price on that item.
You should get an email from them pretty quickly after your inquiry letting you know if they were able to find anything cheaper, or if the one you found is the lowest price.
You might not be aware of this, but many websites customize their content based on your browsing history. For example, if you’re a first-time visitor, they might offer a popup with a discount that return users don’t see.
In order to take advantage of these types of “hidden” offers, try shopping in an incognito window (ctrl + shift + N on Windows and command + shift + N on Mac). While in incognito, you’ll see every website as if it were your first time visiting, and the websites you shop at won’t be able to tell a difference.
Mike is a husband and father of 2 who studies the art of never paying full price for anything.
