In honor of the impending Black Friday / Cyber Monday "festivities", I figured I'd share a few tricks of the trade when it comes to shopping online - likely all things you already know, but whatevs.
cash back sites
Cash back is a truly wonderful, beautiful thing. Programs like Ebates and Fatwallet offer you money back on your purchases; you visit one of these sites first, search for whichever website you're patronizing, click through the cash back link, and BOOM - you're set up to receive a percentage of your purchase amount delivered back into your bank account. Really simple, really useful. I feel like Ebates is pretty old hat around the internet by now, but Fatwallet seems to fly under the radar a bit more. I use both, obviously, for comparison's sake, and go with whichever is going to offer me the highest cash back rate. [both of those are referral links, for the record - I earn like $5 credited to my account if you create an account using my link. plus, you might get a sign-up bonus yourself? I can't remember.] One of my banks [USAA] also runs a similar program that I use, so that's definitely something to look into for your own purposes.
browser extensions
These come in a variety of flavors, but my favorites for Google Chrome are twofold - extensions to search for coupon codes and extensions to track prices. [Fatwallet and Ebates also both offer extensions to alert you when a site you're shopping offers cash back - really convenient if you don't want to go through that extra step of navigating to the website first]. I love and swear by Coupons at Checkout, Honey, and TrackIf. Coupons at Checkout works as a sort of drop-down menu - you click in the box where you would ordinarily type out your promo code, and the extension menu will drop down with a list of what's available [or not] if you're on a compatible site. Honey actually has its own cash back sort of program (HoneyGold), but I have yet to use it so I can't offer much in the way of a comment. TrackIf is a price monitoring program; it doesn't work everywhere, but if you click the extension when you're on the site for an item you're interested in, you can save it to a list within your TrackIf account. TrackIf will then watch the price of that particular item on that particular site for you, and notify you via email when the price drops.
emails
This one isn't exactly foolproof, but I've learned through experience that putting an item in your cart and then leaving the website without checking out can sometimes earn you a discount code delivered straight to your inbox. I actually just used this trick yesterday - I wanted to buy a tank through the Barre3 website but decided I should wait until later in the week to see if the company would run some sort of Black Friday promotion. Fast forward a few hours, and I've got a new email offering me 20% off my entire purchase. Boom.
Emails are also really handy for keeping track of sales and coupons and the like, but they can get to be a rather cluttery handful. For a while there I was using Unroll.me to manage everything - once you connect your email to the program, you configure your settings such that you choose which email subscriptions you want delivered straight to your inbox versus which ones you want filtered out and set aside. Unroll.me takes all of these filtered emails and compiles them into a "Rollup," which you receive once per day [that timing may be changeable? I don't remember off the top of my head]. Meaning you can set things up so that you receive a summary of all your store emails at once, making it really easy to skim through and find the sales that are worth your while. It really is a great service for people who freak out about INBOX ZERO and what have you; I was a dedicated user for a while, but ultimately started getting irritated about not seeing all of my emails. I went on a huge purge of all the random things I was subscribed to, so now I'm only hearing from the stores I care most about.
Along with my giant subscription purge, I also reorganized my email such that now I have a dedicated folder for coupons. If a message comes it with an offer that I might be interested in using, I set it aside in an easy-to-revisit location for potential future use. Everything else simply gets deleted, and every couple of weeks or so I go through and clear out the expired sales. I also have another folder for holding receipts; I move all of my order confirmations and tracking information in here so that it's easy to find and use when I get antsy about receiving a package...aka, about twice a day when I'm waiting on something new and exciting to arrive.
So now you tell me - what kind of tricks do you have for shopping online? Anything useful that I need on my radar?