How to Buy Stuff Cheaper Online

Shopping “in-store” or “brick and mortar” retail will likely exist only as a memory at some point in our (my) lifetime. The only occasions I find myself in a store is when I’m grocery shopping, looking for clothes, or for the sake of entertainment. Still, it seems there are parents and other people out there that stay away from online retail, turned-off by shipping costs and afraid of identity theft. With the abundance of resources and retail competition online, reward greatly outweighs risk, making shopping elsewhere seem like a waste of money. In the 21st century, being a smart consumer is knowing where and how to look for the cheapest price online.

The website I visit more frequently than any other is passwird.com. Yes I know, how petty and materialistic of me. Every day, this site keeps an updated list of the best deals and promotion codes on the internet. Some of you might be familiar with slickdeals.net which is practically the same thing, but I prefer passwird because the pictures are helpful. If I know I am in the market for something computer related, I will generally wait to see it appear on passwird before buying it. If you get it on passwird, you can be confident that you’re getting a good deal.

Another popular site that offers impressive mark-downs is woot.com. This site only features one sale each day, but you can rest assured it’s a really good one. It’s also 2007’s word of the year.

If I’m still unable to find what I’m looking for at either of the websites mentioned above, I will check for coupon codes or promotion news at fatwallet.com and retailmenot.com. Fatwallet is a membership site, offering a cash-back percentage on purchases made at popular online retailers. Also, it has many forums and public threads where users report generally reliable news on promotions and promotion codes. Retailmenot is a search engine platform allowing users to query a retail website and retrieve a list of promotion codes along with their success rates.

As a last resort and a minimal requirement in all online shopping, check pricegrabber.com. It will display a list of online merchants and their price for a specified item. It also enables the user to enter their zip code for a more accurate, definitive quote. This will only report the cheapest retailer without any promotions or discounts.

Lastly, I must recommend the Amazon Prime service. For an annual fee in the ballpark of $90 (usually a promotion can be found with enough digging), Prime members get free 2-day shipping on most items sold at Amazon.com. When I find the difference in price is marginal or insignificant between competitors, I default to Amazon for fast and sort of free shipping. In a year’s time, it will pay itself off especially when shipping large items which sometimes cost close to the price of membership to ship.

Don’t forget, in the end you should try to save and invest some money. Hopefully this will help.