Price Busters For Online Shoppers

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).

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...