5 Little-Known Ways To Save Money On Amazon

(Stephen Woods)

Online shoppers often end up buying things on Amazon by default. They have the best price, and hey, I have a Prime membership anyway! What you may not realize is that there are ways to save money even after you’ve put that package of flea pills or protein powder or new keyboard in your cart.

Grayson Bell over at Debt Roundup rounded up five ways to save money at Amazon that you might not know about. Most of them aren’t even on a similar post on this subject that we published last year! If you did know about them, just sit back and feel smug.

1. Amazon Warehouse Deals. What do you think happens when you return something to Amazon’s warehouse, and the box gets dinged a little bit during the journey? What happens when the customer opens a sealed box, then returns the item? Open-box deals, of course! Amazon’s open-box department is called Warehouse Deals, and you can browse it here. Also check out the very similar Amazon Outlet.


2. Leave your cart and wander off. Doing this makes you a really big jerk while shopping at a store in real life, but is a time-honored method to save money when shopping online. The method is simple, and something that I do accidentally much of the time anyway. Just add some items to your virtual cart while signed in with your account for the site, and then wander off. Many sites will send you an e-mail to remind you about the items that you forgot, and Grayson reports that sometimes Amazon is one of them. “I have saved up to 20% one time when doing this method, but again, this is hit or miss,” he writes.


3. PriceJump. Savings.com has developed a tool (also available as a browser extension) that takes the item you want at Amazon and checks other sites to see whether it’s available cheaper somewhere else. I didn’t have much luck with this: I tried it with a keyboard I have my eye on, and PriceJump said that Amazon wouldn’t let the site import information about the item. Sad.


4. CamelCamelCamel. This site is a tool that lets you get price alerts, track item prices over time, and easily make comparisons. It also has a handy browser extension.


5. Subscribe and Save. This is a tool that’s well-known to regular Amazon shoppers, but worth trying when there is something that you really do purchase at regular intervals. You commit to regular shipments, and Amazon knocks 15% off the price.

5 Little Known Ways to Save Money at Amazon.com [Debt Roundup]