How to Find the Best Prices When Shopping Online
Bargain Hunting Tips for Shopping Online
When purchasing an item online, it’s hard to tell if you’re really getting the best deal.
If you put in the right amount of effort, you can usually save a fair amount of money on a single item. There are so many different websites and an abundance of software available to help you get the best bang for your buck. Take a look at some of options to become a smart shopper of the online world.
Do Some Waiting
Patience is key when shopping online. In some cases, you can check back at a website every couple of days to see if a price has dropped. In other cases, you’ll need to wait for a certain event, release, or season, until you consider purchasing something.
In general, the best time to buy a rather expensive item is at the end of its product cycle. For example, whenever a new phone comes out (say the iPhone5) the price of the last version (the iPhone 4) dramatically decreases.
If you don’t mind a used item, you can search EBay, or Craigslist, at the end of a product cycle; the phones will mostly be gently used, but really cheap.
However, not everything has a cycle, and you might not be satisfied with the older version of a product. If you really want the latest and greatest product, you have some other options.
Sign Up for Newsletters
Many companies send out special offers, and coupons via newsletters, which can sometimes save you a great deal of money. Yes, if you sign up for a newsletter, you’re going to get a ton of unwanted, emails, but one of them might just be the best unwanted email you ever receive!
If you have your email account set to a high security level, you will need to mark the email address from the newsletter as ‘safe.’ If not, you’ll never see any of the emails, and you will miss out of some great deals.
Sign Up for a Deal Notifying Site
CamelCamelCamel and DealNews are websites where you can register for free, and they will send you email notifications of a special deal or price drops on a specific item.
CamelCamelCamel only shows prices and deals for Amazon, but is a very unique tool; it creates graphs of the price fluctuation of a specific item, so you can see if the current price is higher, or lower, than usual. You can also use it as a guide to predict a price decrease. The graphs are a good sign of when the price of that item may drop on a different site.
Check Out Deal Sites
Sites like CheapSally post promotion codes for online orders. These codes can range from anything to ten percent off your entire purchase, to a free box of chocolate with your order. The problem is that the codes won’t always work – they might be outdated by the time you try to use them. Also, since anyone can post a promotion code on the site, some codes may be false.
Searching for the best online deal can be hectic; it requires you to do a lot of work and a lot of waiting. On some items, you’ll find that a lot of work will only save you two or three dollars, but for other purchases, you’ll be amazed at how much you can actually save.
