Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday Shopping [Deals]

We're all going shopping this holiday season, but some will score better deals than others. How to know if you're getting the best items from the best stores at the best price? Easy: technology. From getting the inside scoop on the biggest discounts to making sure you get price reductions after you purchase, here's how to use apps and extensions to automate your shopping savings.

Photo by tele52/Shutterstock.

I personally hate shopping, especially in brick-and-mortar stores, but love giving gifts and, obviously, saving money. The following is how I'm confident I'm getting the right stuff at the right price and even discover new shopping finds along the way...without spending all day bargain hunting. The shopping workflow basically involves: First, narrowing down to the best products using Amazon, deal sites, and review sites, then scoping out the lowest prices using a combination of price comparison tools and coupon codes (automatically delivered when possible), and, finally, timing the purchase with alerts and other shopping insight tools. Signing up for price drop protection services also helps make sure you get the best deals, even after swiping that Visa card.

Step 1: Choose Wisely

A deal is only a good one if you're buying the best product for your needs, so the first thing to do?assuming you haven't already picked out the exact product you want?is figure out what exactly that is (if you have a specific item in mind already?for example, you know you you want a specific video game?skip to the next section). You might know you need a new winter coat or your parents would love a new TV, for example, but not which one out of the hundreds available. (Note: If you're anything like me, researching what to buy will be how you spend 99% of your shopping time. Don't worry though, after all the research, grabbing the deals is the easy part, as you'll see below.)

If it's a really big purchase make a list of the features important to you. If you're not sure what features to look for in a new product, consult a buying guide like PriceGrabber's Shopping & Buying Guides (powered by Consumer Reports), which cover everything from appliances to clothing to toys.

Narrow down your list of potential items: Mega-retailer Amazon may be the best source for narrowing down the universe of all things to buy, with its best sellers and top rated lists of the top 100 products by category. Head over to the best sellers list, filter by category, and start perusing your options, checking the product descriptions to see if they match your list of important features. (You could cross-reference the best sellers list with the top rated list, but generally the most popular items are the ones with the highest ratings anyway, and we're going to look at other rating sites in a bit). Once you have, say, 2-5 products, it's time to hit some other sites.

Check deal sites: Sometimes saving money is more important than getting the absolute best item, or sometimes you'll feel like doing some virtual window shopping first. That's a great time to check deal sites to see what's on sale right now. Sometimes the deal is too good to pass up, even though it might not be the best item in the category. To avoid spending all day wandering around the deal sites, though, just hit up DealNews' Editors Choice page for the best picks and Slickdeals. In Slickdeals, you can do a quick search by keyword, then sort by rating.

Compare user reviews from around the web: Visit previously highlighted Wize to get a quick look at user reviews pulled from Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Twitter, and more (including professional reviews from CNET). Wize applies a rank based on the aggregate reviews for a broad range of categories. You can also get a handy comparison chart for the top-rated products (useful for comparing specs for a laptop, for example).

Professional and enthusiast reviews: You'll also want to check out in-depth reviews from people who've actually kicked the tires on the product and write about that category regularly. You might also find some recommended items outside of the Amazon list. TrustedReviews is a good source for electronics and computers, as is Tom's Hardware and Wirecutter (Whitson also mentioned a couple of other good sources in the lesson on building a computer from scratch.) For networking hardware in particular, don't miss SmallNetBuilder; for really thorough photography equipment reviews, there's dpreview; and for coffee equipment, Coffee Geek. You get the picture, there are specialist and enthusiast sites for just about everything. Cool Tools is another neat review site for a broad range of useful items, and also offers this list of great, focused review sites including ones for mountain bikes, board games, and even flashlights.

Finally, for a collection of professional product reviews in one place, combined with user reviews, visit ConsumerSearch, which covers the gamut of things you can buy.

Step 2: Find the Cheapest Prices for Your Gift

At this point, you should know which thing you want to buy now. Now comes the easy part.

Use browser extensions: Install previously mentioned browser extension Invisible Hand for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE. The add-on checks what product you're looking at or searching for on Google, then searches other sites for a lower, real-time price; when it finds one, you get a cool little notification in your browser telling you where those other deals are. Similar extension PriceBlink does the same thing but with coupons and mail-in rebate notices, and without the Google search lookup. Take your pick.

Quickly check shopping comparison and deal sites: Both add-ons are terrifically useful, but not perfect. A couple of times, for example, Invisible Hand suggested a cheaper price for an item slightly related but not the exact product or didn't make a suggestion at all. If you find this is the case for you, hit up PriceGrabber to compare prices yourself or simply do a Google Shopping search (which can also tell you if products are in stock at stores near you, for those times when you don't want to wait on shipping).

A quick search on Slickdeals for the specific item name might also turn up hidden deals?worth the extra couple of minutes just in case.

Use mobile shopping apps: If you're already shopping in a store or at the mall, you can still make sure you're getting the best prices thanks to great shopping apps for iPhone and Android. I'm using both RedLaser and ShopSavvy to compare local store prices with online ones. Since the two apps are so similar, it might seem like overkill, but in my experience they each sometimes miss a deal the other offers.

Step 3: Make the Coupons Come to You

Retailmenot is one of the best web sites for coupon codes, but even better is their Firefox add-on and Chrome extension, which automatically notify you when coupon codes are available for the site you are on. You might not want it installed year-round, but it's definitely worth it while you're doing your holiday shopping.

FatWallet is another site for your shopping savings arsenal. Start your shopping trip there to earn 1% to 40% cash back and also find coupons and special cash back offers. Or, if you're saving up for college expenses, try similar Upromise, which adds the cash back for shopping from its affiliate links to your 529 college fund; a handy Firefox add-on notifies you when you can earn Upromise savings and if there are coupons available.

Step 4: Buy Now or Set Up Price Alerts

Is the price with coupon still outside your budget? Set up price alerts to be notified when the price drops. This is also useful if you're holding out on buying because you think prices might drop even further. Previously mentioned Decide can predict if you should buy an electronics item now or wait and set up alerts for you, or you can install the Camelizer Chrome or Firefox extension to embed a price history chart right within Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, Backcountry.com, and zZounds so you can see if prices for all kinds of products are rising or dropping.

Since Slickdeals is our favorite deal-hunting site?the community is really fast in digging up the best deals?use the site to set up your price alerts. Click on "Deal Notifications" at the top of the site, then enter in the keywords or name of the product you want SD to look for, which forum you want to search (e.g., Hot Deals), and other parameters. You'll get instant or daily notifications via email or private message so you can finally pull the trigger when the price is right.

Step 5: After You Buy, Get Money Back If the Price Drops

Many retailers offer price drop protection, but manually checking those price drops is a chore. Let previously mentioned Slice do that for you; the webapp combs through your emails to organize receipts, track packages, and, yes, notify you of price drops.

For iPhone users, also previously mentioned app Savvy gets you price reductions by taking a photo of the receipt from one of 40 retailers like Best Buy and Toys R Us.

My Shopping Workflow: Case Studies

So those are some of the best online and mobile shopping tools, and here are some examples of how they've worked for me.

Laptop SSD: I'd been planning on upgrading my laptop's hard drive to SSD, but I wasn't sure which one to get and had a tight budget of around $100.

So, step one, find the product: Using Amazon's best sellers list and navigating to the internal solid state drives subcategory, I found top-ranking laptop SSDs around my target price: a Crucial (64GB), Samsung (64GB and a bonus Batman Arkham City game), and OCZ (60GB).

Searching for "ssd" on SlickDeals, however, and sorting by rating, I found an OCZ 120GB SSD for $70 (after 2 rebates totaling $50) on TigerDirect, which comes out to an insane 58 cents per GB. Getting the rebate seemed a bit convoluted though: you had to also buy CA backup software and sign up for its auto-renewal to get part of the rebate then mail in a different rebate for the other part. Reading poor reviews about the TigerDirect rebate process and issues with the drive (albeit before firmware fixes), made me hesitant to buy, though.

A combination of Amazon reviews, Newegg reviews, and Tom's Hardware's best SSDs for the money finally led to my final choice: the Crucial drive top ranked for my price range on Amazon.

Hopping back to the Amazon product page for the Crucial drive, Invisible Hand automatically told me about places to buy it cheaper, but the eBay recommendation ($32.99 cheaper) was from a seller with a 0 rating.

So, long story short, this owner of an old laptop got herself a new Crucial SSD from Amazon. The $112.99 price, according to the Cameltracker, is $13 higher than its low of $99.99, but still $17 cheaper than its all-time high of $130.

Coffeemaker: The process is pretty much the same for other types of products. However, certain circumstances might change your methods or available tools. For example: When searching for a coffeemaker for my in-laws, I already knew they were interested in a Keurig single serve coffee brewer, so obviously I saved the whole research-the-heck-out-of-products step. Because the coffeemaker is a common appliance, though, review site Wize did pull in reviews for the Keurig (unlike the SSD drive), so I was able to make sure I was buying something they would actually enjoy using. And with some time leeway for buying this before it needs to be wrapped, I've stopped at step 4, setting a daily price alert on Slickdeals and a reminder on my calendar to buy within the next couple of weeks (Cameltracker showed I just missed a big $60 price drop a few weeks ago, so hopefully it'll drop again).

Sneakers: One last example: For impulse buys when at the store (e.g., a bottle of wine on the way home) and things best bought in store, like clothing, your comparison shopping best friend may be your smartphone. When looking for running sneakers, for example, I started my research from a desktop browser (using a combination of Amazon to narrow down brands then previously mentioned Running Shoe Advisor from Runners World to get shoe advice and read reviews). I narrowed down my choice to 4 shoes then hit the mall to go try them on (checking Google Shopping first to see if they were in stock at the stores). I ended up choosing an Asics shoe (a Runners World Best Buy award winner), but both ShopSavvy and RedLaser told me it was about $20 cheaper online, so I just bought it from the Amazon app and spent the rest of the day happy to be done shopping.

Do you use a similar shopping strategy or have other shopping tricks or tools to share with us? Post your comments below.

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You can follow or contact Melanie Pinola, the author of this post, on Twitter or Google+.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/HR9Pf691V3o/score-the-best-deals-with-this-five+step-guide-to-holiday-shopping

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