Online Shopping Tips

Due to our State's tax structure, I typically find that it is less expensive to order an item online and have the company ship it, rather than using the post office/Fedex/UPS. With Christmas looming on the horizon, I though I'd share a couple of tricks for getting the best deals online. Here's a deal I worked last night:

I've needed new sneakers for a while now. My first step was to go to ebates.com. If you're new to ebates, you'll need to register, but it's quick and painless. You can use shopathome, too but their registration process is more involved, so I just stick with ebates for simplicity.

I looked under the "Shoes" tab and saw that they were offering 7% cash back on Puma purchases. Once you've chosen your store, just click their link; a tracking ticket will be opened up and you'll be automatically diverted to the site you've chosen.

Once on Puma's site, I clicked on the Sale tab and found these babies:

credit:puma.com

Originally $65, they were on sale for $31.85. At roughly 50% off, that was a pretty good deal on it's own. I added them to my cart and proceeded to checkout. Shipping was a flat $7.00 and tax was 8.2%, which brought my total to $42.46. Not cool.

So, I went to retailmenot and searched for "puma coupon code" where I found PUMASHIP1011, which took the $7 shipping fee off! My grand total for the order was now $35.46

So, back to the whole ebates thing. With 7% cash back, I'll receive $2.48 in my ebates account, which will effectively make my sneakers $33 bucks, all in all done, which is pretty darn good for getting Puma's shipped to your doorstep! My ebates credit will take 2-3 business days to show up in my account. Once I've reached $5 in cash back (not hard to with Christmas coming up and a big family), I'll be able to request the entire amount in the format I choose, ie paypal, gift card, etc.

Note: I find that retailmenot is the most reliable site for codes, but if you can't find what you need, a good old fashioned google search will probably get the job done, too.