How to Avoid Paying Full Price for Any Online Gift Purchase
The holiday shopping season is off to a digital start. Amazon made a bold statement on the eve of Cyber Monday with a sneak peek at the drone-powered PrimeAir delivery service, while Bitcoin Black Friday allowed shoppers to snap up deals with virtual currency.
Meanwhile, mainstream retailers are using geo-location apps like Snapette and motion-detection sensors like Shopperception to track shopping behavior like never before.
One would think all these technological advances would help the consumer. Instead, most of the shopping technology we're hearing about favors sellers, not buyers.
Thanksgiving, Black Friday weekend, and Cyber Monday online sales hit all-time highs this year, with cumulative five-day total spends showing a 30 percent increase from last year. Retailers that have adopted e-commerce models will garner substantial revenue increases over competitors who haven't gone digital.
But embracing digital strategies can also help consumers save a lot of money, from online pricing insight to personalization techniques. If you're cued in to the digital landscape, there's no reason you should pay full price for anything this year.
Here are five of the latest methods you can use to avoid paying full price online.
1. Use A Digital Shopping Cart or Wish List
Digital shopping carts, such as Mavatar, and wish lists like Hukkster are designed for the sole purpose of saving shoppers money. They are free to use and developed by individuals with a deep understanding of the ins and outs of online shopping. When you have items you want to purchase in a digital shopping cart or wish list, the tools automatically search for online coupons, promotional offers, pricing history and other shopping details - which is more useful than having your shopping list jolted down on a pad of paper.
Holiday Gift Guide 2013
If you have to opt for just one digital tool, look into Price Blink, which covers all the bases. The add-on compares prices, shows you product reviews, price history and coupons, and allows you to instantly add products to a digital product wish list.
2. Buy Digital Gift Cards
In a case where you need to buy first in order to save, gift cards priced below their value will directly save you money on your next purchase. Discounted digital gift cards can be found online from gift card re-seller sites such as Raise.com, which buy back unwanted and partially used gift cards from other consumers, and sell them at discounted percentages through their custom gift card marketplaces. For example, you can get a $75 Dell gift card for $62, which automatically saves you 17.3 percent, or $7, on your next purchase. The term "gift card" on gift card marketplace sites refers to any e-gift, voucher, or physical gift card.
3. Let Experts Do The Work For You
One of the biggest problems with shopping online is the excess of information you have to weed through, just to find what you want. Search engines help, and websites are increasingly designed with the consumer in mind, but it still takes a while to get from opening a browser to checking out. This time span is increased if you consider looking for a special promotion or coupon code. As an alternative, you can go directly to aggregated deal sites that have already done the searching for you.
These sites don't sell products; they simply list the best deals and coupons. They operate, and are paid out, on their capacity to be the middle man and get the consumer from the searching phase of shopping to check out on a retailer site. Oftentimes, deal sites specialize in a specific product category, such as LogicBuy (which is owned by Ziff Davis) for electronics or Jetsetter.com for travel. The best sites do the heavy lifting for you and will create custom deals and deal pricing by combing promotional offers with coupon codes. Though there was a time when deal sites were scrutinized for being unreliable, increased online buyer protection and more informed consumers have made these sketchy sites harder to come by.
4. Abandon Your Shopping Cart
Use retail tracking technology to your advantage with the "abandon shopping cart" game. Online retailers monitor everything from your shopping time to your click pattern in attempts to better understand their shoppers. That includes monitoring your behavior from the time you place an item in your cart to the time you check out, and retailers notice if you fill your cart but never check out.
As a way to incentivize you to purchase, retailers will often email discounts and promotional offers to customers who "abandon" their shopping carts. If you're willing to play the game, you can earn substantial discounts on the items you are already planning to buy. To reap the benefits of the tracking, you should be logged in to the site, so the retailer can identify you as a potential customer.
5. Shop on Internet Holidays
With the increasing popularity of Free Shipping Day, Cyber Monday is no longer the only online shopping holiday. Free Shipping Day, which falls on Dec. 18 this year, is a promotional holiday when retailers jointly offer free shipping for a 24-hour period, with delivery guaranteed by Christmas Eve. Offers with free shipping are posted on FreeShippingDay.com and include small and large merchants. In 2012, it reached over 1,000 participating merchants.
