Over the past few years, online shopping has grown from a niche novelty to a major part of our shopping experience and now makes up a massive portion of the global economy. Many reasons are behind this, but generally, people prefer shopping online because it’s easier to find what you want, and you can get your purchases delivered straight to your home rather than heading out to a retail center.
Online shopping is just much more simple than shopping in person at a store and a lot more convenient, but did you also know that online shopping more often than not works out to be cheaper than shopping in person. Again there’s a multitude of reasons for this, from you avoiding travel and parking costs, to the fact that it’s cheaper for businesses to operate without paying for rent and staff needed for in-person stores.
While online shopping is already cheaper than shopping in person, there are lots of things you can do to make it even cheaper. To get the inside track on how to save money online, we spoke to Online Blinds Retailer DotcomBlinds to see how you can save more money when shopping online.
Shop Around
When you’re shopping in person, shopping around for the best price on a product could take hours going from store to store checking the prices only to have to double back on yourself and return to the store with the best deal, so often in store we don’t shop around and just pay whatever the asking price is.
But when you’re shopping online you can shop around for deals much more easily, just by searching for the product you want to buy on Google will show you all the retailers selling that item, allowing you to quickly look around and see where has the best price for your product.
Ask For A Discount
An easy way to save some more money when shopping online is simply just to phone in or use the web chat feature on a website to ask for a discount. Usually, customer service teams for online retail websites have a list of discount codes on hand and are usually more than happy to give you a discount if you ask nicely.
Of course, you can do this when you shop in person, but staff at a retail store usually don’t have access to the various discounts they can offer and will need a manager to sort a discount which can be a bit of a hard sell, but as we said online customer services teams usually have access to discounts are happy to give them out to friendly customers.
Find A Discount
If you didn’t have any luck asking the customer service team for a discount, you can still find a discount code more often than not. There are a few ways to find discounts, but the simplest is to just search “STORE NAME Discount Code” in Google and you’ll find coupon sites with discount codes available.
Or if that all sounds like too much work for you, you can install a browser extension like Honey to your internet browser of choice. Basically, this extension will spring into action when you get to the checkout on a retail website and look for any applicable discount codes and automatically apply the one that would save you the most money.