If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time, you may have noticed that online shopping is ever-growing. That’s mainly because it’s a lot easier to browse for what you need using an online catalog and then having that certain product delivered to your house. People have got a lot lazier in the last decades and internet shopping is a thing that has been expected to appear. It’s certainly hard to find exactly what you want at a reasonable price, but you don’t need to be an expert to find the best deals. Everyone could definitely use a few tricks to make their online shopping experience a lot easier, while also keeping some money in their pockets.

1. Do your research

You can’t possibly know exactly what you want until you haven’t seen all the available options. Don’t jump onto the first product you find, because chances are that it’s probably the worst possible deal. Avoid searching using the terms “cheap” or “deal”, because people who want to rapidly sell their products typically use these words in their titles to gather all the people and make them buy that certain article for an exaggerated price. Also, once you’ve found your desired product, take a look in the description to make sure that it’s the thing that you actually want.

2. Read the reviews

Take some time to scroll down the page and read the comments and reviews from other people that have bought the product that you want. Thus, you can guide yourself toward the right decision. People that write reviews usually mention the problems they’ve had with the object that they bought, so you can even find the common issues that the product may have, therefore making you have a second thought and hopefully leading you to the best deal.

3. Look on other websites

It’s a common experience that people find the product that they’ve been looking for and instantly buy it, only to find the same product on another website for a lot cheaper. You can avoid this by checking every possible place where you could find what you’re trying to buy and then determining the best deal. You can easily do that by downloading extensions that have this feature built in, like InvisibleHand.

4. Wait for sales

Don’t just buy an item at its full price. If you’re near a holiday or a website’s anniversary, it’s almost impossible that there won’t be a sale. You can even wait for Black Friday if you really want to get a good deal out of the product that you want.

5. Check the price history

Some websites have the bad habit of raising the price of an item and then lowering it by a fraction, so it looks like that object is on sale, but, in reality, you’re paying more for it than you actually need. For this, I found another extension that will come to your help: PriceZombie . It will track the price history of all the items on major websites, making it easier for you to decide whether to buy that product or wait for a lower price.

6. Use coupons

When you’ve searched long and hard for a product and finally found the best deal, you can check if there are any available coupons on that website for an even lower price. And what can help you more to achieve this than another extension? will tell you if there are coupons that you can use on websites in order to get the best deal. It’s a rather misleading name for an extension that will help you with online shopping, but who cares as long as you will pay a lot less for the same quantity.

7. Buy from a place with good return policy

Even if you think you bought the best item for the best price, after a few days you could suffer from a change of heart and decide that you want something else. That’s why you need to be prepared for this by purchasing said item from a website that has an advantageous return policy.

8. Check the second-hand market

Maybe you’ve come to this article because you don’t have enough money to buy exactly what you want. Even if you followed the steps above, you may still be a few pennies short of what you need to buy your desired item. Why not check the second-hand market? It’s a great place to get a lot better deals than buying new objects. But, as always, this comes with the danger of buying broken devices or things that turn out to be something else than you wanted.

9. Search on websites dedicated to deals

Where else can you find the best deals online, if not on a website dedicated to finding the best “bang for the buck” ratio? There are tons of websites that do exactly this thing for all major websites. For Amazon you can search “amazon deals” on Google, for AliExpress, you can go to 2cheap, a recently opened website.

By following all the steps above, you will successfully get the best deal out of an item that you actually want. You can even call yourself an “Online Shopping Expert” and you can start helping other people. Or you could just share this article with them and they will hopefully avoid those sites with overpriced products and find the places with the best deals.