Saving cash on Cyber Monday, Black Friday and other big promotion events is all very well and good, but what if you want to buy goodies during the rest of the year?
Well rest easy, because there are plenty of ways to hoard your cash while gathering up goodies on the web, and they continue to work the whole year round.
Get your web browser to shop for you
Probably the easiest of them is to download Honey, a free plugin for most web browsers that quietly scans shopping websites you’re using and lets you know if it has a suitable promo code.
If it does, it takes just a single click for the plugin to run through all of the codes in its database – from discounts to free shipping and bonus items – and see which ones apply.
It’s not perfect – sometimes it will try codes that are years old, and there’s no guarantee that what it has will fit the product you’re buying – but it’s free to use, and can still net tasty savings.
A similar free plugin is InvisibleHand, which scans the web for the items you want to buy, and lets you know if they’re available elsewhere for cheaper.
It scans not just the big-name brands, such as Best Buy, Target and Walmart, but also small-scale retailers who may have more niche products.
Once the InvisibleHand pop-up appears, it can take you to the cheaper website at the click of a button, or provide a drop-down menu for price comparison with several other options.
The developers claim to have already saved their users $1,088,230,000, and say that on average users save $7.55 on each online transaction.
Another extension is the bizarrely titled CamelCamelCamel, which will watch Amazon and give you alerts if items you want drop in price. You can also use the website to look at how prices have gone up and down in recent times.
Outwit the websites’ digital brains
Online shops have become frighteningly smart at analyzing purchasing habits, and – in the case of travel sites – can adjust prices according to how much their algorithms think you will be willing to pay.
If you want to drop your accumulated browsing history – and with it the sites’ assumptions about your budget – use a browser that offers something like Chrome’s ‘Incognito Mode‘ or Safari’s ‘Private Browsing’.
Both of those modes will hide your Facebook account, email etc, so that stores are unable to connect you to a previous browsing history, possibly leading to a lower price quote.
If you have access to a Virtual Proxy Network (VPN) or another method of disguising your computer’s IP, then you can also try connecting to a server in a less affluent country, which may mean reduced prices.
You can also use the basket trick, which involves racking up items that you want in your digital ‘shopping basket’ or ‘cart’ and leaving them for a while.
Many websites’ algorithms are designed to seek out uncompleted sales and encourage buyers to take the plunge by offering discounts for items they’ve earmarked but not bought.
It’ll also help you avoid rash impulse purchases!
And if you like vouchers and coupons, sign up to sites with multiple emails – that way when they mail out discount codes, you won’t just get one of each.