3 ways to save money on online shopping – before, during and after checkout

Here are three of our favorite tools to save you money on all those items in your cart.

1. Capital One Shopping: Find deals before checkout

With social distancing still in effect, you've probably been doing a lot more shopping online lately. But the big online retailers don't always have the best deals, and they’re counting on you to prioritize saving time over saving money.

Fortunately, a free service called Capital One Shopping can help you save both.

When you’re browsing a big site like Amazon, the Capital One Shopping browser extension will instantly price-check the item on other online retailers across the internet. It even takes taxes and shipping costs into account.

Then, when you’re ready to check out, it will automatically try to apply coupon codes to your order that have worked for its other users in the past.

Alternatively, if you prefer to do your shopping in person, you can use the mobile app to quickly check whether an item is available for a better price somewhere else.

Capital One Shopping helped people save over $160 million in the last year. With just a few clicks, you can start saving, too.

2. Honey: Find promo codes at checkout

If you’re a fan of old-school coupon-clipping, this free browser extension is for you. Honey searches over 30,000 websites to find promo codes and automatically applies them to your cart when you checkout online.

For Amazon shoppers (and who isn’t one?), Honey can also help you search for better prices at other stores. And now that they’re part of the PayPal family, Honey users can benefit from the free PayPal Rewards program. Users can earn points on eligible purchases, which can then be used toward cash back or store gift cards.

Another neat feature is Honey’s price tracker, Droplist. If you have eyes on an item at a particular site, Droplist will alert you when they detect a price drop.

Honey’s website claims it saves online shoppers an average annual savings of $126, and an average discount of almost 18%.

3. Fetch: Earn rewards after checkout

There's a good chance that groceries are one of your biggest regular expenses, and a solid cash-back rewards app like Fetch will ensure that you get a bit of money back every time you stock up.