Getting the Best Deals While Shopping Online
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In the last decade, we’ve seen a major disruption in the shopping market. Shopping used to be done by walking into stores, malls, and shopping centers. However, with the introduction and mass adoption of the internet, a larger number of individuals are now shopping from their homes. These shoppers visit e-commerce websites to choose a variety of electronics, clothing, and jewelry that would be shipped to their doorsteps.
Shopping online brings convenience to our lives. You can shop online while travelling, in your workplace, on your way to the gym, and so on. Also, due to the increased level of e-commerce websites out there, lots of shops offer discounts to attract online traffic.
Shopping online could be fun, especially when you have enough money to facilitate all the items and services you want to pay for. Saving money while shopping online can double the fun. Everybody wants to shop online and get commodities for lower prices than they expected.
Back when shopping was restricted in-store purchases, discounts only happened once a year during the Black Friday sales. Another style of getting a discount was finding a coupon in the newspaper. Nowadays, shopping online and getting the best discounts is a skill on its own. Here are the best ways you can save more while navigating online shops.
Tips to Save Money on Online Deals
- Get a VPN
While you download a reliable VPN to facilitate safe browsing the internet from the convenience of your home, you can also find the best discounts for the items you intend to purchase. Not to mention you get to avoid the high rates of sales tax in your region.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it works by encoding the data sent between your device and the website you’re visiting. It also protects your device from being hacked or discovered by malicious elements.
Typically, when you visit a website, it immediately classifies you based on the country you’re browsing from. Many do not have knowledge of the fact that online retailers practice price discrimination. Depending on the location you’re visiting the e-shopping website, the average price of items could be lower or higher than the market price.
This variety in pricing is referred to as ‘dynamic pricing’. If you’re visiting a shopping website from a first world country or region, you’re bound to pay more for items that use ‘dynamic pricing’.
Once you have your VPN, preferably a paid one, you first need to clear your cookies, cache, and browsing history. Once that’s done, launch your VPN and connect to a location in a different city or country. Check the prices on the website from that location, and repeat the process. You’ll discover the changes in pricing. You can then choose the location with the least pricing to make your purchase.
A VPN can also help with pricing for hotels and flights. Booking the flight or hotel from a lower-income region or third-world country could help lessen the price you’d pay.
- Shop Online During Certain Days
Because of work, studying or any other activity you handle on weekdays, you might find the idea of making your purchases on the weekends. The problem with that is a lot of other individuals decide to do online shopping during the weekend. This factor leads to a surge in pricing of products ordered making certain these goods cost more temporarily.
To get the best deals, you have to wait until days like Wednesdays and Thursdays where more discounts are offered. However, depending on demand for a product or service, weekends could be the best days to shop.
With a little bit of research, you would be able to find the days you can best get discounts for certain products and services.
- Ask for a Price-Fall Rebate
Let’s assume you purchase a TV online on a shopping website today and two days later, you find out the price has dropped by 10%. You could get furious at the fact that other shoppers get to buy the item at lower prices than you did. This is where the price-fall rebate comes in.
There are shopping websites that will offer you a rebate if the price of a product drops some days after purchase or delivery. For instance, Amazon will kick back the difference between your purchase price and current price of a product if you contact them on the issue. The rebate will hold for 7 days after the product gets delivered to you.
There are also certain credit cards that give automatic price protection to online shoppers. Basically, it would refund the difference in price dip for a product or service you purchase within a couple of days.
- Bargain with Customer Care
If you discover a recently expired coupon in your email, instead of feeling remorseful about not checking your email earlier, you can call customer care. Once you’re engaged in conversation with them, you can narrate your issue. The truth is many sales representatives are simply looking to close deals in the shortest possible amount of time. Most times, your coupon will either be extended or you’ll be given a new one.
This usually depends on the cost of what you intend to purchase. If you’re calling the customer care hotline for a cheap product or service, you could be wasting your time. Many don’t know this, but customer care agents, especially those that handle live chats can give specified promo codes that can’t be accessed by the public.
- Forget Your Shopping Cart
Because of the fact that most shoppers are impatient when making purchases online, many don’t know shopping websites can send you a coupon after abandoning your shopping cart. E-commerce websites typically hate what seem to be unclosed deals and attempt to send you coupons or discounts to retain you.
What you should do when you shop online is to pick all the items you want, then abandon the cart for a day or two. It’s usually within this timeframe that the website would send a coupon code to your email reminding you about your abandoned cart.
- Get a Price Comparison App
There are browser extensions and applications out there that will help you pull different prices from varying websites for the same product. They save you a lot of time and money and expedite the whole process of navigating from website to website. Usually, these applications list different websites side by side, showing you the current prices. They can even display items with available coupons.
In addition, some of these price comparison apps scan barcodes and give you the exact prices after tax and shipping.
The whole concept of shopping has changed tremendously. What used to take place in stores and malls can now be done with a few clicks from the home. Although shopping online is easier, it doesn’t need to be more expensive. You can purchase items and services at the lowest possible price by using price comparison applications, bargaining with customer service, using a VPN to get location-based pricing, and shopping only on certain days and periods.