Ways to Save Money Online

Freebies

While you're window shopping online, look for interesting freebies offers. Most freebie offers require purchases or commitment to join membership. In some cases, the freebies are completely free without obligation to buy anything. For example, qualified professionals may get free trade publications per your request. If it is a free try service offer, you want to make sure you can cancel before the trial period ends if you're not satisfied. Remember not to over subscribe just because freebies seem free, only take what you want and what you need. Read between the lines about the terms and conditions. This approach is fun and for window browsing online.

Price Comparison

For a given product item that you want to buy, always perform a price comparison just like you'll do so for an in-store purchase. You will not need to burn your gas stopping by stores to get price tags. Online price comparison tools have made this task easy for you. Simply remember to visit BizRate or eBay-owned Shopping.com and type in the product name of your interests, the price comparison site will return price range of the products offered by multiple online merchants, with shipping and tax factored in if you specified. Other sites like PriceRunner and Google's Froogle are also specialize in price comparison. However, cheapest price offer is not always the best offer. If you see an unrealistic price from a merchant you never heard of, think twice, or you're likely to pay the price of going cheap. This approach is becoming a must for shopping electronics and items of the same quality that can be found at many online merchants.

Online Coupons

While price comparison suggests you better sale prices, it does not cover implicit promotions as good as a deal search engine does. Promotions found using a deal search engine like Keeca.com gets you special coupon codes that you may deduct dollar off or percentage off your total basket price, or offers special coded links land on special discount pages not found from regular price comparison sites. Keeca.com constantly updates its deal database with the latest extra online savings that you can apply toward hundreds of online merchants. This approach is becoming more popular that stretches your online savings even further. To be comprehensive, here is the list of my recommended coupon sites.

Online Rebates

You can register with one of many online rebate sites and become a member to get cash rebate from your online purchases from hundreds of online merchants. evreward.com does this pretty well by puting together a very informative site to show you where to get how much rebate back from dozens of online cash-back sites.

Cash-Back Credit Cards

Credit card payment is popular and convenient when it comes to pay for your final online order. It is the most popular payment method offered by almost every online merchant. In an online transaction dispute, you may be able to request a chargeback through your card issuer for extra protection then pay by a regular check. As a matter of fact, a couple card issuers offer great cash-back programs that you can earn back cash of 1% to as much as 5% from every dollar you put on your credit cards. If you can manage to pay off your credit cards every month, which you should, the up to 5% cash back will be yours to pocket eventually. This approach is best for disciplined credit card users who won't fall into the trap of APR. 1% to 5% cash back can easily mount up to several hundred dollars savings a year.

Shipping Cost

When doing price comparison for the same item, watch for the final shipping cost. In some cases, a merchant that offers the best sale price might surprise you with its shipping charge at the checkout, while merchants offer free shipping may be better choices. It makes a lot of difference when merchants offer free ship on heavy big items like furniture.

last revised on 2006-08-29
by Charles Gwa