How to save money when shopping online: 5 useful tips

Saving money when shopping online is like an art. Just like using coupons at a grocery store – if you do it right, you can save a lot of money! Below are some tips that should help some of you save some of your hard-earned money the next time you shop online.

Search Coupon Codes
One of the benefits of shopping online is that there are all kinds of online coupon codes (also known as promo codes) floating around the web. These codes have become so popular that entire websites have been developed that focus on sharing these codes with the online shopping community! Coupon codes that companies offer can range from saving a certain percentage to receiving a free gift with a purchase. Anything goes! With little effort, these codes are not that hard to find. It’s worth taking a few extra minutes to do a quick web search for any coupon codes that could benefit you with your next purchase.

Two quick ways to look up codes are to go to coupon code websites or do a search on one of the search engines. There are quite a few websites that host these codes for hundreds of businesses. Some of these websites include CouponCabin, CouponMountain, and PromotionalCodes.

If you have no luck with these websites, try doing a search on Google or another search engine. For example, if you wanted to find coupon codes for company X, you could use the following search queries:

promotional codes company X
company X coupon codes

It might take a bit of digging, but it’s worth spending some time doing some research to use potential coupon codes. You never know what you might find!

Check out price comparison search engines
You’ve probably already visited at least one comparison shopping engine on the web and didn’t realize it. This is because most people do not refer to these websites by their official internet marketing name. Price comparison engines are websites that allow Internet shoppers to view different price points from a variety of retailers for a specific product, hence the term “comparison shopping.” This process makes it easier for the consumer to find the best possible price for the products he is interested in purchasing. Below is a list of some popular comparison shopping engines, some of which you may already be familiar with (and you now know the official internet marketing term for these websites):

Yahoo Shopping
Shopping on Bing
Google Products
PriceGrabber
next label
presents

Check out daily deals websites
The “a deal a day” business model has become popular in recent years. For those of you unfamiliar with this model, it’s a type of selling style where one product is sold per day at a discounted rate. The product is available for 24 hours or while stocks last. A new product is released the next day, and the cycle repeats. In recent years, more and more e-commerce sites are being launched that follow this type of business model. Some companies stick to the traditional “deal of the day” style, while other daily deal companies offer two, three, or sometimes even more product deals per day.

That being said, it’s a good idea to check out some of these sites to see if the product you want to buy happens to be a daily sale. Savings on these sites can be as much as 70% of the retail price, sometimes even more. As mentioned above, there are quite a few daily deal companies on the web. Some examples of these online websites include MidnightBox, ScoobyDeal, and Shnoop.

Sign up for local daily deals websites
Like the daily deal websites mentioned above, these local daily deal websites offer deals on products or services that are local to your area. These websites partner with local restaurants, bars, spas, gyms, bakeries and many more industries to bring you the daily local deals. Two popular local websites for daily deals are Groupon and LivingSocial. However, with some of the local daily deal websites, there has to be a minimum number of consumers who purchase the daily deal for the deal to be valid. If the minimum number of orders for that daily offer is not reached, then the offer is voided and the money is returned to the credit cards of the people who purchased the offer.

Visit websites for community-powered deals
The content/offers displayed on these types of websites are mostly driven by the internet shopping community. Two examples of these websites include FatWallet and SlickDeals. Internet shoppers post offers for products they think others might benefit from on the shopping forums hosted by these websites. Shopping forums are where people can post and discuss product deals. There are some great finds that one can find on shopping forums. The forums are free to browse, however if you want to contribute to the conversion or post a deal of your own, simply create a membership account. Most of the time, it’s free.

In addition to shopping forums, these websites also have shopping bots that scour the web for the best deals. When found, these offers are published on the website. Take the time to do some quick searches on these websites. You may end up finding great deals on products you may need (or want).

Insider Information Secret
There are some ecommerce sites that develop different landing pages with different price points for their marketing campaigns. For example, you may be able to find a cheaper price for the exact same product by clicking on a Google-hosted business ad than by navigating directly to the website (by typing it in your browser). Why do companies do this? Well, it focuses on the type of audience that uses various search methods on the Internet. People who search for brand name products through search engines or through price comparison engines tend to be price conscious when shopping. To handle this type of audience, companies can create unique landing pages to serve the people who come from these marketing channels.

To express this concept in another way, think of TJMaxx and Marshalls. These two stores tend to sell some of the same products found in popular department stores. However, the price points for these products tend to be much less than what you would pay at department stores. Consumers who prefer not to shop in department stores tend to be price conscious of their purchases, so they look for alternative methods to purchasing brand name items, one such method being shopping at discount retailers.