How to Buy Safely and Save Money While Shopping Online

Money saved is money earned.

We all love offers, deals and discounts when it comes to shopping. The shopping experience gets even more exciting when the savings are more. And what’s better than getting everything delivered at your doorstep while shopping online right from the comfort of your couch.

The online shopping is becoming the most preferred way of trade thanks to the emergence of e-commerce sites. Developing countries like India is rejoicing the continuously increasing e-commerce space as many prefer to buy things online rather than the retail stores.

While so, there are various e-commerce websites coming in, and getting the best deal out of these becomes difficult sometimes. It’s a tedious job to do online research about the products you need to buy online for getting the lowest price; especially on the branded products.

Here, we have included a few online shopping tips and the websites using which you can find the best deals and save huge while shopping online.

Tips to Save Money Online

1. Subscribe the newsletters

One of the easiest ways to get informed about the discounts on latest products and price drops is to sign up or subscribe to the newsletters of online price comparison websites. Such sites continuously keep track on the prices of the popular products and notify you where you can get the lowest price for different products.

Certainly, this method will result in clogging on your mail inbox. Though, you can create another email account specially for getting notifications about shopping opportunities.

2. Discover coupons instantly

Using coupon codes for getting discount or cashback is a delight for many of us. You can cut down the time it takes for searching the coupons by using this simple tip. Just type the brand name followed by “promo code” on Google and you will find the latest and working coupon codes.

Furthermore, you can consider subscribing to email newsletters of your preferred shopping sites and get the discount codes delivered right into your mailbox.

3. Compare

There are numerous trustworthy shopping websites in India. Hence, determining which of them has the best deal on a particular product becomes time-consuming and effortful. You can eliminate this by using online price comparison websites like Pricekart.com or others.

They generally have a collection of updated prices of a variety of products across the various e-commerce sites. So, you just have to perform a search on their portal for a particular product and it will display the different prices of the product on various shopping websites.

4. Unleash Social Media

Every shopper has a list of preferred brands when it comes to shopping. Keeping an eye on the latest deals and offers for each and every brand is surely not feasible all the time. Although, you can streamline this process by using your social media account. Simply follow your favourite brands on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to name a few.

It is very important for any brand to stay in touch with the shoppers. Even if you miss newsletters (which often settles in Junk folder), you can get updated about the latest trends and new product information from the social media feeds. Moreover, the popular brands advertise their products and services on social media. Many of them even inform us about the deals and discounts.

5. Use advanced search options

Tired of using the regular search engines for finding good products? Well, all of us have! The relevancy, authenticity, and reliability of the search results derived from search engines become doubtful sometimes. Also, we don’t get enough filters to find the exact match products.

A precise online search portal can be a better option to narrow down the search results. Furthermore, there are a few specialised online search portals to help you find the correct and branded products at cheapest price across various e-commerce stores. For instance, mobile comparison website called Mobikart.com allows users to search and find the best available price of different smartphones.

Using these five tips, you can save a lot of amounts while shopping online. At the same time, don’t let anyone dupe you by accessing your personal and financial details. There are a few safety measures one should follow while making online purchases. Here are few of them.

6. Check for the HTTPS prefix in the address bar

Many online shoppers don’t pay attention to the URL of a page where they are buying products. However, overlooking this might result in online phishing. Check for the HTTPS certification before making any purchase. Most of the browsers display a lock sign next to the address bar that represents the HTTPS support. And if there is no such prefix available on the e-commerce website, then avoid making online payments on such sites.

7. Avoid using non-trusted Wi-Fi connections

Free Wi-Fi network in airports, coffee shops, or any public place is a nice option to access internet on the go. However, using an unsecured Wi-Fi network for making an online purchase can result in theft of your private data.

Conclusion

Using these saving and safety tips, the online shoppers can stay secure and save a lot. Hope these tips will help you save huge while shopping online. Also, let us know if we’ve missed any important tip.

How to Buy Safely and Save Money While Shopping Online was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.