With online stores becoming smarter and more creative to lure buyers to their website. With one-click spending, dynamic pricing, low-stock alerts and page wide sale-banners tempting the customer to buy more, it becomes all the more important for the customer to make informed purchase decisions. To get the best value for money, a smart shopper would not only watch out for traps but also put to use ideas that would save money while shopping on the internet. To help you get more for your money, here are some tips and tricks for saving money on online shopping.
- Beat their pricing strategy
Retailers often put up different prices for different customers based on their location, browsing history, spending patterns and current demand of the product. A help way to get around this trap is to limit the website’s ability to track your activities. Before you check out products on a site, make sure that you have cleared cookies and history on your browser, logged out of membership accounts and switched to incognito mode or anonymous browsing to get less biased results.
- Compare prices on other sites
With a little time and patience, you can get your product for the lowest price using comparison sites. These sites tabulate various prices listed on different online stores for the same product. Sometimes, they also list bank and credit card offers, which can bring in extra discounts. The only thing you need to remember is that these sites only track a few popular websites, not all the retailers. That means, the lowest price on a comparison site may not be the lowest available online.
- Use coupon codes
Believe it or not, there are good discount sites with coupons that will help you save on a lot of things that you pay for online. This list includes not only regular products, but also hobby classes, shopping, grocery, utility bills, entertainment and travel among others. These websites also have social media accounts that you can use to get the coupons on your social media feed.
- Look for cash back promotions
Many online shopping sites offer significant cash back to customers for shopping through selected credit cards, website app, payment wallets etc. The idea is to encourage you to shop more and return to the same e-retailer for your next shopping spree. Other than the seller website you are shopping on, you can also try third-party websites that offer cash back offers. They get paid by the retailer for being a marketing affiliate and directing you to the main website for shopping online. Such cash back offers range anywhere between 5% to 30% on the cost of your purchase.
- Set price alerts
If you have to make an important purchase, it would be a good idea to set a price alert or use the Google spreadsheet to monitor fluctuations in prices of the desired product on different retail sites over a period of time. You can get updates on change in price as frequently as you like and it doesn’t take a long time to set up such a tracker.
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