Online Shopping: 7 Strategies for Big Savings
Buying online is supposed to be about finding better shopping opportunities and better prices. You need to go about it the right way, though, to make sure that you really do see these benefits. Here are 7 shopping strategies to help you make the best of your time shopping online.
With some products, you can buy in large quantities to save
Many online stores offer steep discounts to those who order their products in bulk. If you choose to bulk-order a product that you use a lot of – diapers or other baby care items, for instance – you’ll save plenty both on product and delivery costs. We love shopping places like Costco.
Look Around For The Lowest Prices
It’s far easier to compare prices and shop around when it’s online rather than at physical stores. Yet, to many people, the extreme ease of comparison shopping that online shopping allows only encourages laziness. A surprising number of shoppers look at no more than two well-known stores when making purchases online. It’s important to resist the temptation to click that Buy button, the first chance that you get.
Shopping On Impulse
The reason it’s hard to be responsible and shop around when buying online is that having everything you need to buy at the tip of a mouse arrow encourages impulse spending. It’s easier to hit Buy than it is to take an item to checkout at a physical store, wait in line and ring through a purchase.
Online shopping comes with some of the same dangers that shopping with credit cards is known for – the buying process is so quick and effortless that you don’t quite realize what you’re doing. With both it’s easy to buy more than you need. It’s important to guard against impulse shopping when you go online then.
Keep an Eye on Shipping Costs
The shipping facilities at a store can be an important part of the shopping experience they offer. Some even offer guaranteed next-day delivery (NextDayDeliveryShops.co.uk has a great selection of such stores).
Shipping, though, can be expensive. Approximately half of all online shopping attempts are abandoned at the stage where the shipping costs are revealed. It makes sense that people would cut and run when they see the shipping costs involved – unless a shopper is signed up to a shipping program like Amazon Prime, shipping costs can be so expensive that any savings on attractively priced products are wiped out. Before you begin shopping online, you should set yourself a shipping budget for the month. It’s important to never exceed it.
You can get FREE 2 day shipping with memberships like Amazon Prime
Don’t Forget To Always Check For Coupon Codes!
There are more coupons available for online shopping than there are for shopping at physical stores. Before you pick one product over another at an online store, it’s important that you consult a search engine for the products that you can find the best coupons for. To savvy online shoppers, coupon availability is always an important factor in the product they finally decide to buy.
My favorite happens to be RetailMeNot.
Make Purchases Through a Cashback Website
Doing your online shopping through a cashback service can be a great way to save money. This is how cashback services work. A business decides to sign up as an affiliate to a shopping website. As an affiliate, they get a commission for every sale that they make for the shopping site. They then advertise to shoppers that when they shop with them, they get a share of the affiliate commission that they make – in the form of a cashback deal. These websites usually work very well. As long as you choose a well-known site like TopCashback or EBATES, you should make a great bit of savings.
Shop Like a Pro with Mobile Apps
Mobile shopping apps bring you all kinds of money-saving tricks. You get to find where the best deals are, get special offer alerts and so on. You can even have them help you monitor how much you spend. New mobile apps come up all the time – you need to be on the lookout and grab a few. I happen to love using apps for stores like RueLaLa and Zulily as well as shopping apps like ShopStyle.
GUEST BLOGGER: Elise Brooks prides herself on living well on a tight budget. She greatly enjoys blogging about the strategies and resources for smart money management in today’s households.