Holiday Savings Strategies
Sharon Koehler
Artistic Stone Design
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WikiBuy save alert. WikiBuy runs in the background of your web browser and searches all web retailers for the lowest price. |
Don’t look now, but the holidays are fast approaching. YIKES! Black Friday is right around the corner, followed quickly by Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. According to the pundits, we will spend a record amount this year on all the upcoming festivities.
Hopefully, I am in time to help you save some money this year on your Cyber Monday shopping (or any Internet shopping). You need to be aware of and use Honey and WikiBuy. The great thing is that you can use these two apps together.
Honey is an app you download to your computer. It runs in the background and saves you money automatically. Honey hunts for discounts and coupon codes for you. You don’t have to lift a finger. Once it finds the codes or discounts, it automatically applies them to your transaction at checkout. No longer do you have to hunt for codes that are outdated or expired. No longer do you have to sift through lists of coupon codes that might or might not work. Honey does it for you. If you have your own coupons, no worries; you can enter your coupon codes into the Honey “Share a Code” section, and not only will you get your coupon discount, but so will other Honey users.
Now, since Amazon is a big part of holiday shopping, Honey does a great thing on Amazon. Have you ever searched for a particular item and found that Amazon gives you 15 or 20 pages to scroll through? Who has time for that? You search down the list for the first thing that fits what you want, and you add it to your cart. With the Honey app, once it’s in your cart, Honey searches all of Amazon to see if another seller has your item for a cheaper price. I recently saved $4 on some food storage containers because Honey found them cheaper from another seller. Who doesn’t like to save money?
If you don’t need the item right away, you can add it to Honey’s Drop List. Honey monitors price fluctuations on millions of items. When you add an item to Honey’s Drop List it will monitor the price of that item for you and alert when the price drops more than 5 percent. You can keep an item on the Drop List up to 90 days.
Honey works on Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Edge. Honey works with a growing number of online retailers, including, but certainly not limited to: Amazon, Kohl’s, Groupon, Starbucks, Vista Print, Macy’s, Fandango, Wal-Mart, Target, Michaels and ThredUp. These are just a few, as the list continues to grow.
WikiBuy is a downloadable browser extension and it also runs in the background. WikiBuy can also help you save money, but WikiBuy is different than Honey. It doesn’t shop Amazon for sellers with a less expensive price. It shops other stores and alerts you to other retailers selling the item for less.
I recently saved over $15 on an item I was purchasing on Amazon. The item was $42. I put it in my cart and WikiBuy gave me a SAVE $15 alert.
WikiBuy then gave me a drop- down menu with a list of other on line retailers selling the same item for less money. I picked another retailer selling the item for $20.99. Now, I didn’t qualify for free shipping (like some Amazon Prime items) so that added $4.95 to my order, but even with shipping costs, that is a savings of $16.06 on one item! This feature is free with WikiBuy, and I didn’t have to do anything except take 30 seconds to download it.
It gets better! I mentioned that WikiBuy and Honey can work together, and they do. On one item, Honey told me that $42 was the best Amazon price, but when I picked a different retailer selling the item for $20.99, Honey automatically found me a coupon code for an additional $2.10 off the price.
I saved a total of $17.16 on this one item because I took the time to download these two apps for free, and spent about five minutes total setting them up.
One of the great things about this is that they work all year, not just during the holidays, so you can save money all year. Admittedly, $17 on one item is extreme. Usually I get alerts for $2 or $3 off, but that small stuff quickly adds up. The thing is, stores have sales all the time, but who has time to browse the store ads for three or four dozen stores to save a few bucks? I don’t. Now I don’t have to, and neither do you.
Another great thing is that these two bits of software is they don’t just work for individuals. They can work for companies, as well. We all shop for office supplies. Imagine my surprise when I was in our office supply account and WikiBuy told me I could purchase the exact same item at another retailer for $2.48 less. That’s not a lot, but it can add up. What company doesn’t do everything they can to help their bottom-line? $2.48 now, $10 next week and $5.36 the week after, it goes on and on. How many dishwasher strips or C clamps can you buy with your savings? Especially when the set-up for the savings is free. And let’s face it, FREE is the best savings of all.
Please send your thoughts on this article to Sharon Koehler at Sharon@asdrva.rocks.