Price Busters For Online Shoppers

Category: Shopping

Shopping online is a two-step process; first, find the product you want, and then find the best price for it. A lot of factors may come into play, including sales tax, shipping fees, and the availability of discount coupon codes. Read on to learn about three nifty tools that will help you get the lowest price when shopping online...

The Foreman Resolution

Former heavyweight boxer George Foreman did commercials for Meineke Mufflers in the 1990s, and famously said "I'm NOT gonna pay a lot for this muffler!" That was a few years before ecommerce went mainstream, but if you start your online shopping expedition with the same resolve, you can save money, too.

There are several browser extensions that make it easy to find the best price for a given product. Unfortunately, there is no single extension that does everything. So here are three price-busting extensions that can be used simultaneously.

Honey automatically finds coupon codes for you while you are shopping. Just register at Honey’s site and install the browser extension. Then, when you add an item to a site’s shopping cart, click the Honey icon to display the coupon code that saves you the most money (or learn that no coupons are available).

price busters for online shopping

Honey also gives you cash back on purchases made from its participating sellers, including brand names like Macy’s, Walmart, Sonos, and HP; the only catch is that must wait until the seller’s return period has expired. Honey is available for the Google Chrome browser and as an Android app.


Lots of people shop on Amazon because of their "free 2-day shipping" option for Amazon Prime members. But the truth is that free shipping isn't always free, and Amazon's price for a given item is not guaranteed to be the lowest. WikiBuy tries to solve those problems by finding discount coupons, and shopping around for the seller with the lowest price, factoring in discounts, sales tax (if any), and shipping charges. It even helps you compare shipping dates and estimated delivery times of multiple sellers.

You don’t have to click an icon as you do with Honey; WikiBuy runs in background and pops up the information you need while you are looking at a product. WikiBuy works only if you're shopping at Amazon with the Google Chrome browser.


The Camelizer extension also works only with Amazon. It provides a shortcut to the CamelCamelCamel database of historical prices, presenting charts that show how the price of an item has varied over time. Amazon prices, along with new and used Marketplace sellers’ prices are plotted on a single graph. At a glance, you can see the volatility of an item’s price and which sales channel you should choose.

If an item’s price is pretty stable, you may as well buy it now. But if it has fluctuated significantly in the past, you may want to set a future date on which to check the price again. The Camelizer accommodates these options. The Camelizer is available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and works with a slew of national retailers.


These price-busters can save you lots of time and money, but there are hidden costs to consider. First, the sellers generally pay a commission to Honey, WikiBuy, or Camelcamel for each sale; that commission will be added to the price you pay. None of these apps covers every seller, and there is no guarantee that the best possible price in the universe is available through any of them.

"I Know What You Bought Last Summer"

Finally, these apps know what you’re shopping for, where you’ve shopped, what you bought, and how much you have paid. That data may find its way to data brokers, who in turn bundle it with other data about you and sell it to marketers.

Honey's privacy policy says: "We promise not to sell ANY of your personally identifiable data. Ever. We also promise that we do not collect any data that is not necessary to save you time and money. It’s that simple."

CamelCamelCamel's privacy policy makes a similarly clear statement: "We will not sell or trade your personal information for any reason without your prior consent."

But Wikibuy's privacy policy is a bit murkier. It says: "We will not disclose your information that we collect through Wikibuy to third parties without your consent. We may sell or disclose information to third parties if you consent to us doing so." But there are exceptions. "We may make certain aggregated, automatically-collected, or otherwise non-personal information available to the public or to third parties for various purposes, including … business or marketing purposes; or to assist third parties in understanding our users’ interests, habits, and usage patterns for certain programs, content, services, advertisements, promotions, and/or functionality available through Wikibuy." They also say "We may disclose personal information to our affiliates." That language seems to leave quite a few doors open.

With so many massive data breaches and security vulnerabilities reported on a regular basis, you may wonder if anything is private any longer. If you've given up on the notion of online privacy, you may not care about any of that "data sharing" if you end up saving money. It's good to have choices.

Do you use these or other tools to save when shopping online? Your thoughts on this topic are welcome. Post your comment or question below...

 
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This article was posted by on 25 Sep 2017


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Most recent comments on "Price Busters For Online Shoppers"

Posted by:

Tom
25 Sep 2017

I somehow got Honey added to my extensions for Chrome but checked it out and removed later. I just don't trust ANY coupon searching app as in the past they had a tendency to take over your browser and bombard you with information you didn't want.


Posted by:

Colin
25 Sep 2017

I used Honey, but it never seemed to find anything, so I disabled it


Posted by:

Ken
25 Sep 2017

Bob

Just a quick info. In the UK you don't have to think about sales tax, the price you see on any goods { includes sales tax } is what you pay.

K.C.


Posted by:

Ken
25 Sep 2017

Bob

Just a quick info. In the UK you don't have to think about sales tax, the price you see on any goods { includes sales tax } is what you pay.

K.C.


Posted by:

tony fernandez
25 Sep 2017

Is it to early to get cccleaner back? any good alternatives? thanks.


Posted by:

Nancy
25 Sep 2017

Tony Fernandez the newest version of Ccleaner is good


Posted by:

MmeMoxie
25 Sep 2017

@tony fernandez - Yes you can get CCleaner back! It must be version 5.34 and later is all. They have found the "bug" and fixed it. Don't know why it took them almost a month to notice that something was wrong, but thankfully they finally did notice.

I would run a complete scan, not a quick or short scan, with Malwarebytes or your Anti-Virus program first before I would re-install CCleaner. Scanning first is what Piriform recommends to do.


Posted by:

bill
25 Sep 2017

I don't want extra browser extensions of background software that is around 100% of the time for the 0.1% when it is wanted.


Posted by:

Kenneth Heikkila
25 Sep 2017

I have not found any of the coupon finders very useful, including honey. Nearly always expired coupons and when one works there is almost invariably a cheaper price elsewhere. However what Honey does well is tell you if the price you are looking at on Amazon is the best price and they also tell you if the price often changes and when it lately did so. I Google everything I buy. first for reviews, then to find who sells it at what price and then check Amazon and Ebay if they don't come up in the original Google search just to be sure. Contrary to what you often read Amazon is just as likely to have the cheapest price + shipping and tax as any other site and with my Amazon Prime I sometimes am happy to pay an extra dollar or two for two day shipping rather than wait a week or two. A lot of other vendors are starting to offer quicker shipping at no extra cost to try to stay competitive.


Posted by:

Glen
25 Sep 2017

I feel they all have good intentions at first
Then the temptation of being purswaded buy money
over comes honesty


Posted by:

Gerry
25 Sep 2017

Firefox's "Invisible Hand" add-on has saved me a good number of dollars. It's drop-down shows prices for the item I'm looking at...on other sites. Often (since I'm NOT an Amazon Prime Member) it saves me shipping costs when it points me to the same item on eBay...at the same or cheaper price...with FREE shipping.


Posted by:

Hank
25 Sep 2017

On Amazon if you put an item in your list (if you don't need it right away) it will tell you the next time you're on Amazon how much it went down. I bought a pair of sunglasses when it told me it was down 18% from when I first put it on the list. Also when you check Amazon for a price also check Walmart because they have the same price or better because they're trying to get some of Amazon's customers.


Posted by:

robert rambaldi
26 Sep 2017

I've used Ebates for a few years, got back over $300.. just add items to my cart at most websites, then click on Ebates popup and get check every 3 months..


Posted by:

Jay R
26 Sep 2017

Avasts has some sort of add-on (I guess) that reports lower prices. I have found it to be worthless and have told Avast so a a couple of occasions. The major problem is that it shows me items that DON'T match the one that I am shopping for. I believe that I must have disabled it because it has not annoyed me for some months now.


Posted by:

Robert Hall
26 Sep 2017

I like 3 camels. I also use a slightly different app that works most places but Amazon, http://pricepinx.com/


Posted by:

GuitarRebel
28 Sep 2017

I tried Wikibuy but they wanted access to all of my Google contacts.
Two words.....no way.


Posted by:

Wendy Fisher
28 Sep 2017

I have used Honey and it has saved money several times recently on Amazon. Thank you for the information and heads up on the other options!


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