Making Purchases Online: Four Tips For Smart Purchases

Image via Smithsonian Institute

I only started making online purchases regularly in the last year. I know. I am a little late to the game! However, in the last year I have made a number of purchases online that saved me a lot of money over buying in a brick and mortar store. Here are my favorite tips for saving money making online purchases:

1. Use Ebates Ebates is a great online tool to save money when ordering things online and it is the first place I go if I am shopping online. Ebates gives you up to 25% cash back at over 1000 stores when you make purchases thorough them online.

There are a huge selections of stores. From clothing retailers like Aeropostale, Old Navy and Baby Gap to car rental agencies such as Enterprise and Avis to craft stores like JoAnns to mass retailers like Target and Walmart, there are over 1000 stores that will give you cash back, just for making purchases through Ebates. Many stores also offer you coupon codes to save even more.

The best part is that if you use my referral link to sign up for Ebates, you will receive a $5.00 bonus to your acount after making your first purchase.

2. Retail Me Not If I don’t find a good coupon code at Ebates, I try Retail Me Not. They have coupon codes for over 20,000 stores! You simply enter the name of the store you want to buy from and all of the latest discount and promotional  codes for that site will pop up. You will find codes for anything from free shipping to a certain percentage off.  Retail Me Not is incredibly user friendly and easy to use.

3. Beat My Price The same brilliant people who came up with Retail Me Not come to our rescue again with Beat My Price. Once you have found a great price on a certain item, head to Beat My Price and enter the item, where you found it and the price of the item. You will then see how your price stacks up with what other shoppers have found.

There are also other price comparison sites like Nextag, Pricegrabber, and Bizrate. Pick one that you like.  One thing to watch out for when you are comparing prices is shipping. Many times the lowest priced seller may have the highest shipping cost, making them actually more expensive.

4. Resellerratings Many times in comparison shopping you come across sellers that you have never heard of. Perhaps it is a great seller, or perhaps it is  scamster that is going to rip you off. So to check out the rating of a particular store, head to Resellerratings, and enter in the name of the store.

What you will see is a 6 month rating on a scale from 1 to 10 and also a lifetime rating on a scale from 1 to 10. You can also read other people’s reviews of the store. Resellerratings makes it very easy to determine which stores to avoid, not matter how great the deal is.

Those are my best tips. I would love to hear your tips for saving money buying online in the comments.