5 Tips to Save More While Shopping Online

Five Tips to Save More While Shopping Online

In the past few years, the popularity of online shopping has skyrocketed. It’s quick, easy, and usually cheaper than buying in-store. With a few tricks, you can increase your savings even more. Here are five tips to save money with online shopping:

Always look for discount codes.

Many online shopping websites have coupons and discount codes for large orders or for specific items. Before you check out, run a Google search for a discount code or check a couponing website. Many stores don’t allow multiple coupons or discounts, but if you find more than one, try anyway. If the site does allow you to apply more than one coupon, try applying them in every possible order before checking out. Sometimes, the order in which you apply coupon codes will make a difference in how much money you save.

If you frequently shop at a particular store, consider “liking” their Facebook page. Some retailers share special offers and discount codes exclusively with their social media followers.

Compare prices.

Comparison shopping is one of the best ways to save money online and offline. Before purchasing anything, always check prices on other popular sites, or use a comparison website like shop smart to run a comparison check for you. You can either switch your purchase over to the cheaper site, or, if you’re loyal to a particular site, you can try to contact their customer service representatives and ask them to match the price.

Add items to your cart and leave before checking out.

If you don’t need to purchase an item immediately, add the item to your cart and leave the site for a few days. Many online retailers will notice when you leave items in your cart and will send you coupons or discount codes to convince you to go through with your purchase. This only works if you are logged into an account on the website, but taking a few minutes to set up an account may be worth the money you save. Plus, if you wait a few days before buying an item, you’ll be sure that you’re not just making an impulse purchase.

Sign up for emails.

Many retailers send out exclusive coupons and deals to their mailing list, so joining the email lists of the sites you visit the most frequently can bring you some big savings. If you have multiple email addresses, you could sign up with more than one email to increase the number of coupons you receive.

To avoid filling up your inbox with emails from online retailers, you can install add-ons to your email that organize your messages and automatically unsubscribe you from spam messages. Some add-ons will even condense all your emails from retailers into one daily message to reduce the clutter in your inbox.

Avoid dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing is a strategy that many online retailers use to show you prices based on your browsing history, your online shopping habits, and your location. For example, many airfare websites will show you a cheap price initially but will increase the price dramatically when you check again a few days later, because you’re more likely to actually buy a plane ticket the second time you visit the site.

To avoid dynamic pricing, clear your browsing history and cookies before you visit an online retailer. Logging out of your email and social media accounts will also help. If you use Google Chrome, browsing in incognito mode can prevent dynamic pricing as well.

-This is a guest post by K. Taylor