Do you find yourself shopping online more than you used to? And if so, are you making
sure that you’re getting the best price? In this video, I’ll cover six easy to use
strategies that will help make sure you’re getting that best price possible.
And what about that saying , ‘work smarter, not harder’? I’ll also share some tools
near the end of the video that will put some of these cost-saving strategies on auto-pilot—you
just can’t beat saving money using very little effort…so stay tuned!
Welcome to Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise where we talk about little things that can lead
to big improvements in our financial and physical health. If you’re interested in these things,
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Okay, so these are some crazy times we live in! So many stores have been closed over the
past couple of months for in-store shopping. And because of that, people are adapting and
shopping online more than ever. Wait…you say you’ve been shopping online forever?
That’s great…but I have to ask…do you also always make sure you’re getting the
best price…or…do you just get everything from Amazon and call it a day?
Well, Amazon is a great place to start—because over my 20 plus years of shopping online,
I’ve learned a couple of things about Amazon—first, that it’s a great shopping experience with
a ton of products, BUT second, it isn’t how it used to be. Until the past few years,
I could feel pretty confident that the best price I would find online was at Amazon, however,
that’s not always the case anymore. Also, have you noticed the search results have gotten
a little less straightforward if you don’t have the exact item typed in—often giving
you higher priced options first, even when you filter for the lowest price? Or that the
return process has become a little more cumbersome? What has happened is that Amazon has grown
into a powerhouse company with a super-loyal customer base, and because of that, they no
longer have to sacrifice profits by selling at the lowest prices to gain market share.
You absolutely will want to check with Amazon because sometimes they will still have that
best price, but you shouldn’t stop there without checking around.
The next thing you probably already do is to do a search for the product you want…you
go to Google, type in the product name and you get a list of places you can buy it. Now,
you probably already know that the rank isn’t set by the lowest price, but often by companies
paying Google for visibility…after all, advertising is how Google makes most of its
money. A step that can sometimes be helpful is when the search results come up, you can
go right below the search box and hit the ‘shopping’ filter which will then allow
you to sort from low to high while always wanting to consider the shipping costs as
well. Again, you can’t be confident that all of the shopping options will come up for
what you’re looking to buy, but again, it’s another strategy you can use.
Now let’s say you know exactly where you want to get the product you’re wanting to
buy, so in this case, there are a couple of things I recommend doing. Number one, if there’s
a store you shop at a lot, you definitely should consider signing up for their email
list or join their loyalty club. Now you will get a lot of email by doing this, so you may
want to use a secondary email address just for these stores so your main email account
isn’t swamped. But in return, you will get many offers that can include big discounts
and offers of free shipping. And if you’re on a loyalty program, you may also get extra
discounts based on how much you buy from them. The second thing you may want to do, particularly
if it’s a store that you don’t shop that much from is to do a search for coupon codes
for that store. You may have to check a few different sites that come up in a search to
make sure you’re getting the current best codes, but also because some sites that offer
codes make you sign up and you may or may not want to do that—that’s up to you,
but it will, likely everything else, result in more emails and spam.
Here’s another strategy…do you a have triple A membership card or some other type
of discount card? Make sure you take a look to see if the store you’re shopping at is
on their list of merchants with discounts. It’s smart to frequently check out their
websites to see what current discounts they offer because the offers can and do change
over time. Did you know that even how you pay can save
money? For instance, I always recommend using a credit card over a debit card for financial
security protections—there are so many reasons that I recommend paying with a credit card
over a debit card that we’ll cover more about this in an upcoming video. But even
beyond the extra protections a credit card can provide, you can save money with many
types of credit cards as they might offer cash back with your purchases; now if you
don’t have a credit card that offers cash back, you may want to look at getting a card
that does . I actually have a card from Chase that gives you 1% back on everything plus
it has rotating categories that will give you up to 5% back—I’ll put a link in the
description if you’re interested. As far as using a credit card, I will say using this
strategy only works when you always pay your card off in full at the end of the month,
because let’s say you get anywhere from 1 to 5% cash back, those savings can easily
be erased by any finance charges you incur because you didn’t pay off your balance
in full and will cost you much more for the product in the long run.
Another payment option is using a gift card. Now using a gift card in general doesn’t
save money and has some risks, primarily if you misplace it, so you want to protect the
card closely. But you often can get a gift card at a discount, you see this a lot at
grocery stores or big department stores, or again through a credit card promotion where
they may offer you $5 dollars off a $50 gift card from a certain retailer. A popular program
at many grocery store chains is to offer you extra money off of fuel through their fuel
discount programs when you buy groceries or gift cards from them. There are also some
online gift-card trading sites that you could check out, however, I’ve not personally
used them and would just recommend caution if choose to do that. If you have used one
of these sites and had a good experience, please share in the comments.
So those are the 6 main strategies I use every time I shop for something online. To keep
this video from getting too long, I’ll talk more in-depth about these and other tips in
upcoming videos. But I did promise you that I would share some tools that use some of
these strategies automatically for you—saving you time, effort, and money! And in the spirit
of this channel---these tools are all free to use. So what are they? Well they are extensions
that can be added to your computer’s Chrome browser. Some of these require you to use
either a desktop or laptop to be fully integrated into Chrome, whereas on mobile devices, you
may have to download an app. But these tools can do two of the main strategies above for
you, which are, comparing prices between different stores and also to automatically try and find
a coupon code that gives you the best savings. How awesome is that? Now, from my experience,
they’re not perfect as they don’t all work on every website, but if one of the extensions
don’t work, then the odds are decent that another one might so I have four of the most
popular extensions always on when I’m shopping. If you’ve never used these before, I would
definitely check them out. The ones I currently use are from Honey, InvisibleHand, RetailMeNot,
and PriceBlink. Again, it’s pretty cool on how they work behind the scenes. Keep in
mind that they do tend to work better on the bigger, well known sites as compared to the
smaller mom-and-pop type sites. What I’ve personally found is that they are better for
finding coupon codes versus comparison with other stores, but they can often help you
get a lower price and save a lot of time from you searching yourself.
Alright, so now you have some basic, easy-to-use tools to help you shop smarter and save more.
I hope you have found this video helpful, and if you did, please hit that like button,
share with your friends and family, and subscribe to the channel. I also would love for you
to comment on a strategy that you’ve used that I didn’t cover so that we can all learn
from each other on how to take little, easy steps in making big improvements in our lives.
Thank you again for watching and until next time, have a great day!