How YOU can save money online.

Photo by Altermark

Unlike my other tutorials, this will be a different one as I will teach you not how to make money online, but how to save money online. I’m more than sure that you’ll get something out of this and that in the end you end up saving yourself a few bucks.

• Shopping Online
  When you go to a mall you see different stores with different names, all those brands that you see are chain stores. The way chain stores work, is a business owner buys a Franchise from a chain store, in this example let’s pick Nike.

  When the business owner buys the franchise, he is buying a contract with Nike. After the business owner buys the franchise, Nike becomes the product supplier and they sell products at a factory price or even at a much lower price to the owner of the business.

  Let’s say that Nike gave “X” business owner a shoe that costs $40 dollars, what “X” business owner does is he adds a percentage of profit and adds it to the original price, so let’s say he wants to get a 25% profit, now he will try and sell that $40 dollar shoe to you for $50 dollars. Buy wait that’s not all, that shoe that you are trying to buy had to be shipped and handled, that’s another $5 dollars to the actual price. That’s a $10 dollar profit that “X” business owner is making, and that’s a $15 dollar loss that you are having.

  The way that you can avoid that loss is to stop buying stuff at the mall and buy it online, because when you buy it online you are actually buying the things directly from the factory and most companies sell online at factory prices.

  I have seen shirts and shoes that usually sell for about $50 dollars in malls being sold online only for $40 dollars or even less at online stores, and since most stores offer free shipping then you will not only save the money that was going into “X” business owner’s pocket but you will also save yourself the money for the shipping and handling.

• Using Coupons
  When you buy online you don’t have to carry those old bulky coupons that stores send to your mail, you can actually look for coupon codes online and use those coupons to save money when buying stuff online.

  Since I’m cheap with stuff I buy online I always check for coupons before buying anything. Just last week I was buying myself an Invisible Shield for the ipod Market leverage sent me and I could not find any coupons at all, I even talked to one of their representatives asking if they had any coupons and they told me they didn’t. Minutes later I found myself surfing Google until I finally found a coupon which saved me $5 dollars for my purchase.

  You can laugh at my cheapness (I don’t even know if that’s a word), but those $5 dollars are being used to pay for the hosting of this website, so even if you only save a couple of dollars, that money can be put to good use.

• Checking different prices
  Most people rush at things and don’t ever look things over which is why they make mistakes. If you are trying to buy an ipod don’t just go to Apple.com and buy an ipod, or don’t rush to that Circuit city and purchase the first ipod you see.

  You should always do research when you buy stuff online, you never know what kind of deal you might find laying around in Google.

  It actually took me less than a minute to find a great deal on a new ipod nano. HappyJigga just saved himself $30 bucks buying a brand new ipod nano from a reputable Ebay seller.

  If you are trying to find a great deal online make sure that you actually check who you are buying it from and make sure you read what you are buying don’t just glance at the picture and click buy.

  I had a friend who bought a $500 dollar ipod last year only to find out that it was a toy, and of course the scammer didn’t get in trouble because he had clearly written that it was a toy ipod, but my friend didn’t read the whole page he just saw the pricture and he ended up loosing $500 dollars. So learn from his mistake and read!

• Affiliate Programs
  Most companies offer affiliate commissions, what that means is that if you sell their product they’ll pay you a percentage of what the customer paid.

  You can exploit affiliate programs by actually joining your own affiliate programs and saving yourself some money.

  A great example for saving money is to get a hostgator affiliate account. If you sign up to your own hostgator affiliate account you can end up saving yourself a month of hosting or even more.

  As thenetfool said, “I could get a 2-year “Baby” plan at Host Gator down from $214.80 to $121.84 by applying a 20%-off coupon and buying a package through my own affiliate link.”

So I leave you all to meditate with your new online saving skills. Feel free to post any questions as I’d be more than happy to answer them.