“Smarter Ways to Shop Online” on U.S. News & World Report

03/17/2015

By Geoff Williams

Use these tools and tactics to find the best deals.

Online shopping is basically 20 years old. When Pizza Hut allowed customers to order pizza online back in 1994, it was considered revolutionary; the same goes for when Amazon.com first went live in 1995.

Depending on your age, you may see online shopping in one of three ways:

  • As something that's been around since the dawn of time
  • As a still relatively unusual way to pay for items
  • As a new idea that just may catch on one of these days

However you feel about online shopping, it is probably more complicated than you think. If you want to save money and find the best deals, you'll need to do a lot more than punch in your credit card number. Try some of these tactics:

Check out sale aggregators and cash-back sites. If you spend serious money online, you'll likely want to do more than just go to your favorite website and shop. Consider buying through a third party. Ebates.com, for example, gives a small percentage of the sale back to you later in cash form; FatWallet.com also gives cash back and has coupons and various deals.

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