How to Save Money on Online Shopping

Episode five oh four, how to save money on online shopping.

Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to save money, embrace simplicity, and live a life here your hosts Jen and Jill.

Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jen, my name is Jill, and back cole up. Because we have a lot of information for you in this episode. Don't worry. We are including links to everything in the friend letter that comes out next week. We just want to give people a week to listen to the show before we put it in the April thirtieth friend Letter. But it's a lot of shopping links.

Jen is on a roll right now. She just got back from a conference. She is hyped up and wanting to give frugal education like drinking out of a fire hose.

Yeah, and this episode is about online shopping, so we're giving online resources obviously not.

Resource. It's so good. Yeah, just get ready. But first, this is brought to you by buying stuff. We all do it. Sometimes we feel good about it, sometimes we feel bad about it. But what if we made great, guilt free spending decisions every time we bought stuff? Sound impossible, it's not, and we wrote a whole book explaining how this can be our reality called buy what you Love without going broke, get it wherever books are sold, yes, or.

Buy what you lovebook dot com because this is all about online shopping today. Oh now you're not going to be able to buy it used yet I hope.

I think you might be able to.

I don't want you to selfishly, but bookshop dot org is the best place to buy it. So that is at buy what you loovebook dot com. Thanks everyone, all right, So a really good one to queue up after this one. If your mindset is in the online shopping realm, is episode four to thirty. Four ways online stores get you to impulse buy. We want you to save money, but we don't want you to buy things impulsively that you don't need. We don't even think impulse buying is the

I'm so sorry. We'll link it all right.

So let's get into how to save money on online shop. First, I want to give some context to the episode and the areas because online shopping is very broad. We're gonna give some context to the areas that we will focus on based on stats. So in twenty twenty four, US consumers primarily spent their online shopping dollars in specific categories. Forty three percent purchased online purchased clothing online. Thirty three percent purchase shoes online, so that's gonna be one category,

Shoes and clothing, electronics, books, personal care items. Okay, so you know our new format. It's telling you how to get these items for free, low cost, a deal, or guilt free. So we're going to go through these categories and subcategories within that framework. So let's talk about how to get all this stuff for free online. So the first category is your shoes and clothing, and we're going

But this is something that can be done online as well. So creating a Facebook event where a couple friends are posting some of their clothes in this group and you are virtually exchanging things and you can either send them if they're low costs to ship, or then meet up or meet up at a central location or bring to other people's homes. So this is something that can be done in person, but it can be done virtually even

If you want to get some free electronics, you could consider product testing and review programs. So some places that offer this type of thing include Best Buy, Tech Insider Network.

And this is where the links start in the front letter next week. So don't crush your car trying to write all these down.

Crush your car.

If you were listening to this in the car and you're like, oh.

Oh, crash your car. Okay, crush your car, I thought you were using some new fangled lingo that I'm like, I can't keep up with you. You go to a conference, you come back and I can't keep up.

Okay, in influenceder buzz agent, so bzz agent again, we'll have the links Smiley three sixty sample source.

Now hear me out. We're talking free stuff, so you're not going to totally know what you're going to get sent, and you're not talking to laptop or Yeah, if you're on the lookout for something specific, this is probably isn't necessarily the way to go. But if you are super techy, you would love the opportunity to try out some new tech, possibly have some stuff to maybe be able to resell eventually. There you go.

These are the things that you would probably I think impulse buy online tech wise, like I would rather go into Verizon to buy my phone my or Apple to buy my laptop. Granted I did buy my laptop online last time, but yeah, I'm going to smaller things. I'm going to be app to buy online. And so that's the type of thing that these things are obviously doing. And then for personal care, we've got samples again, so you could go on Facebook Marketplace and see if there's

I'd love to take it all right. Moving on to the low cost category, how can we get something for less expensive? And this is going to be certainly a lot of secondhand. So when it comes to clothes and shoes, two different categories I want to look at with in clothing and shoes. One is for your kind of like mainstream somewhat trendy type fashion. You've got part Poshmark, so that's going to be like, yeah, the mainstream trendy shoes, accessories,

Shopping for your children, yeah, or your nieces and nephews or yourself. You're just trying to relive those younger days thread Up. So thread Up has a huge inventory of women's and kids clothes, specifically some men's clothing too, although you all are out here knowing that there is just not a huge selection of men doing secondhand with their clothing.

I don't know what they're doing with their clothing, but they are not. Travis is thrifting, I know, but there's not as big of a section at any thrift store, the guys versus the girls sections. And it's just so hard to find stuff.

Yeah, I mean tell that to Travis. He finds stuff all the time.

Yeah, it depends on It does depend on what your style is.

Every time we go thrifting, he comes back with more than I do.

Yeah, okay, then you've got Mercari. So this is kind of a general marketplace. It is great though for shoes, casual clothes. eBay is good for classic clothing, for both high end and affordable secondhand fashion, and then if you want to go more luxury however, with your clothing and shoes, The Real Real is a luxury authentication site. They sell designer clothing, bags and shoes secondhand. Vestier Collective that's international designer resale and luxury goods fashion file with a pH.

All right, So second hand books, we're looking at thrift books, better world books, but then we also have I mean, if you're on Amazon, you'll be able to see save with used, so you've got it there too. Basically anywhere. You could even look at your local bookstores. There are a lot of bookstores that do part new, part used books, so they may sell books online. We have the book Rescuers here in Largo and it is just like three

Yeah, okay. Electronics this is a category where you can utilize sites like back Market. They've got a massive selection of refurbished phones, laptops, tablets, so that's pre owned electronics but have been refurbished so they can work nearly like new again. Also a site like declutter with no E at the end, it's just declutter. Declutt r great for

Yeah, if you do the big box stores, yeah.

Which is awesome.

I will say a tip for buying secondhand or refurbished electronics. I have found that you are better off going all in with the bigger electronics than the smaller ones. And I've purchased many electronics from pawn shops and I have verified my life laptop, so I'll give specifically a laptop and some air pods the laptop used it for years completely like one hundred percent authentic, not refurbished, one hundred

Up being knockoffs.

They were so close to being authentic, like everything looked authentic. They looked authentic when they connected initially, but then there were just problems and and eventually it turned out that they were not real. So the lower cost items, lower cost electronics are going to be easier to knock off and you risk fraudulents.

So having.

A place to that verifies and stands by what they sell is worth it. For the lower priced items. It's much harder to replicate a full MacBook, so not as many people do it, and you can actually feel safer about maybe the online pawn shop purchase. I would be definitely going in store for something that big. But if I'm going to like back market, then I would feel

Oh okay, So in.

My research I found some bulk resale options and this is mostly for resellers. So you know those people you know hot bins hot buys, those crazy hot by crazy hot buys. This is where they get their crazy hot buys is from stuff like liquidation dot com, bulk dot com with a Q eight eight eight lots. I'm sure Amazon has their own like liquidation site, but resellers online, resellers buy these big lots for a couple hundred bucks,

I mean just on bulk dot com. They also have appliances like you can get a kitchen aid set washer dryer for like two hundred bucks plus shipping and not look into how much shipping will cose it.

Yeah you could if you're nearby, you can organize your own shipping for these places. And they ship from all kinds of different so it's not one central place. This is literally like CBS, it's trying to get rid of this cold medication and it's at their warehouse and they just use liquidation dot com as this like third party to connect their stuff to buyers.

Okay, now we're moving on to deals deals, deals babe, and this is the category where we're kind of talking like what types of coupons or sales deals might you be able to find on these things and how do you find those sales? So across the board on all of these categories you can use racketin so this is a browser extension that finds any rebates and deals for you and automatically applies them to your purchase if you have the browser extension downloaded. Use our link because it

It's a spend forty and then you get a forty dollars bonus cash back, and then we also get forty dollars at no extra cost.

To everyone's just winning one win. So what it means for you is that essentially your thirty or forty dollars purchase is covered, not to mention than all the rebates that you get back. So we will get a check quarterly just for the online shopping that we did. Sometimes it's a few dollars, sometimes it's more than that. Like I've had personally a racket in check for like twenty twenty five bucks back in the mail, which is very fun to receive just for the shopping that I'm already doing.

We go friend the podcast dot com slash Racketin is our link.

We'll have it in the show notes too, but there you go.

Yeah, okay, So deal aggregator websites, so you can use something like Brad's Deals. They are a partner of the show, and they will aggregate deals across mostly Amazon, but like a lot of different retailers, retail Me not Slick Deals. They also will aggregate deals. Blackfriday dot Com, which is originally for Black Friday ads, it actually aggregates store flyers year round, so if you want to see a store flyer for a complete store, not just like random deals.

Yeah, and of course there's always the trick of patients just waiting for a day, a deal or a sale to come up. So Black Friday sales actually start in October.

Now, yeah, prim add an extra day like it was just in July, but now it's also in October two. So like when Amazon does something, everybody else does it too. So now Black Fridays, if you look at discounts, like the number of stores doing discounts in a graph, Black Friday essentially starts in October at that week.

Yeah. And also usually without fail, if you leave an item in your cart, whether it's for Amazon, or really anybody else who has a shopping cart you're shopping online. If you leave it there, usually you'll get it'll trigger an abandoned cart discount, so you'll get some sort of email or pop up screen saying, hey, did you forget about this? You want a fifteen to twenty percent off coupon.

I've actually done that with I've been really wanting to try Beam Dream. It is an evening drink that you drink like thirty minutes before you want to go to sleep. And I don't act. So the reason I haven't pulled the trigger is that I don't have trouble falling asleep. I am exhausted all the time, but I do love to have an evening warm beverage, and I don't. Sometimes I'll have coffee in the evening. Oh no, still doesn't keep me up, yike, But I don't want to be

Of beam Dream. Oh fun. And it's so expensive.

So I put it in a cart and signed up for their text messages, and I keep getting text messages with discounts. The biggest discount i've seen is thirty five percent off. When they gave me that initially and then expired, and then they gave it to me again, you're just playing.

The long game. I kept playing the long game.

But what I'm saying is like, don't put it in the cart unless you know you really really want it, because it will tempt you. Oh, keep buy it every day. I it's not tempting me enough to buy it because it's so expensive. But if I was on the fringe, surely it would have pushed me over if it was a little less expensive initially. If you're listening, you have a hookup to beam Dream, then I will gladly beam me up, Beam me up, please, all right, gil Freeze.

This is our category where we were talking about how to now just buy it full price, leaning towards local, sustainable values driven decisions. So before you buy it full price from a big box store, see if you can get it from a local retailer or if there's a more sustainable version. This is certainly where chat GPT can come in handy, and also just local Google searches of the stores that you know are are locally owned in your area.

Yeah, so if you can't get it for free, low cost, or get a deal on it, then ask if the purchase gets you more of the fore f's the more things you truly value. For us, family, friends, faith, and fulfilling work tend to be the things that we value most.

And since buying online is typically where we do the most impulse spending, or where a lot of impulse spending can happen because it's so easy and the barriers are so low and there's not a ton of friction, our advice of creating a wish list is still going to stand.

And then finally think about price per use. So this is, if I buy this, how many times do I have to use it to get to a price per use than I am comfortable with? And if I don't think I'm going to use it that much? Then can I resell it at a price where I can get to this price per use? Remember we can always resell things too.

All tricks, a little dangerous.

It's not going to push you over the edge. But the budget spreadsheet is mobile optimized, so it's going to allow you to open the spreadsheet up and track transactions mobile and before you make a transaction, open it up, plug into these calculators and see, okay, is it worth that? Because people always tell you to do that, But like when you're in the store and you're about to make the purchase, how do you do it? Where do you

Yes, I'm so excited for this because it's mobile optimized and it's beautiful. Yeah talk about online tools, Well, you know what else is beautiful and an online tool.

And nobody who's ever called in for this is a tool Jill.

Oh, good one the bill of the week.

That's right, it's time for the best minute of your entire week. Maybe a baby was born and his name is William. Maybe you've paid off your mortgage. Maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill anymore. That's bills, Buffalo bills, bill clon, this is the bill of the week.

Hi, this is Lisa from Boston. Wanted to tell you about my bill of the week. That kind of goes along with my mantra it never hurts to ask. So this month, I was in the middle of a free trial of a productivity tool for my freelance business. I noticed on the website it really wasn't geared towards freelancers. There was geared to bigger businesses. But I really liked what it did.

And when I got an email during the free trial kind of showing me around and asking how I liked it, I said, I totally love it, but the cheapest plan is still a bit outside of my price range. I might not be her target demographic, but I do like it, and I wanted to know if maybe there's some freelance plan that maybe isn't on your pricing page, and they said, yes, actually there is. Use this promo code, which I did and I got fifty percent off that.

Plan for the first year. So I'm really excited. And if it works well and I get more business, maybe next year wouldn't be so hard for me to pay full price. So anyway, it doesn't hurt to ask, and wanted to pass that along. Thank you.

I love this, Lisa. I love the it doesn't hurt to ask mantra. Let's all adopt it to act. This would go so beautifully into our framework of that third question, how can I get it for a deal?

Act?

Just even if they don't have it on their sales page. People don't want to lose money. They might take a little less money.

They love your money. They have of your money than none of your money, and if you really want to give them your money, ask.

Just ask. This is a beautiful example, Lisa. I love it. Well done, and I hope your business grows by leaps and bounds and that you need the top tier of that productivity tool if that's what you want. I mean, I also want you to enjoy your life.

Scale pay for the enterprise version of that software, because you.

Need to the big, big business one version.

I hope to need the enterprise version of softwares because that's because I am an enterprise.

Yeah, a kingdom, some might call it. Well, if you all listening, have a billity you want to submit, if it's about building an empire or a kingdom, or just asking about getting a deal, or your name is Bill for over on the podcast dot com slash Bill. We can't wait to hear it. And now it's time for the route.

All right, what's one thing in your cart that you're waiting for the right time to buy? And it's not in my cart because I don't keep things in my car. We don't do that for Beam. So maybe that is what I should have said you already Beam dream is actually in my cart? But a bathing suit? Wow, I am trying, and maybe we can talk this out right now? Should I get a used bathing suit? Is right? That is a debate a hot topic. Right, it's not like underwear, right,

How is it not underwear? But is it okay? You know what? I am making a face? Actually I have a used bathing suit.

I've the coffee she says it about the used bathing suit.

Everything I have to have.

Thing she judges, she does, she does not use or kise.

Listen, listen to me. I need to be allowed to have an extreme reaction and then and then the permission to backtrack it. Okay, because listen, you say nevers all the time, and then it ends up being what we do. So let me have my initial visceral facial reaction and then and then my truth telling where I do say that the bathing suit I am using right now is but see the difference.

Between my nevers is that they are not judgmental. There I will never do, not things you should never do.

I thought about it. You're right, I'm going to try and grow. I can't be an enterprise yet. I have to work my way there. I gotta scale. Okay, have an initial reaction.

Maybe I'll just buy new bathing suits.

I needed to have remembered that this is the life I live.

I would love to hear your ideas about it, my friend listener, just in Spotify and the comments.

In the comment cells.

Please don't judge me as harshly as Jill. It is truly a question I am asking.

Yeah, no, and I'm realizing that. My answer is, you know what. Yeah, however, there are some standards with this, and obviously we're all gonna have standards.

Right.

It can't be faded, it can't be Lucy goosey, it can't be pilly. Nope, it can't have stains on it, No stains.

I have standards.

Yeah. Yeah, of course.

We're looking new, but maybe we were secretly not.

Okay, Okay, is there a used bathing suit you have an eye on currently?

I see, that's when I'm trying. It's not in my cart.

I am.

I want to buy a new bathing suit, but I don't know like I want to. I want to be sustainable and and buy a used one, but I'm not sure if I if it's going too far.

Okay, yeah, I.

Don't think it is, because people don't wear bathing suits that often or for that long, right right.

So.

Yeah, yeah, it's possible. I cannot shop for clothing, much less a bathing suit online. It's just not for me. I have to be able to try it on because I hate the nuisance of returning things. I will if I change my mind or something doesn't work, but i'd rather avoid it, so I am an in person clothing shopper. We'll see.

I still haven't decided yet. I'm waiting, okay, but it is on my mind.

Well, and the thing about getting it used online is you probably aren't going to be able to return it. That's a big risk. You might waste more money.

That's another risk. Yeah, we'll see TBD.

Okay. Well, mine is something that did already happen. Can that count? Because usually I don't actually have anything divulge buying? Okay. I am not one of these people out here willy nilly with whatever kind of personal care, facial, skincare things that I want only willy nilly to judge, not you know what, trying it out? Okay, seeing of judgment works for me.

I feel like it doesn't. I think it's always directed towards me.

Two times, Jen, you're gonna be okay, and you know what, maybe you learn something wow. Okay. So I don't want to be trying out a bunch of different products just because I got them for free. I've really enjoyed finding what works for me, and I am willing to pay for that guilt free. So I have found this brand. Uh, it is called a dime They do not sponsor us, but really kind of clean ingredients. I've been really happy

I love that for you, Thank you. And it's something you've been using for a long time that you can say on the podcast and recommend.

Right, yeah, I've been using it for at least a year and a half now, probably.

Nice and what products are you using?

I will get their gentle jelly cleanser, A toner, hyerlonic As, Serum day cream, night cream, I cream.

You really strayed from our Minimalist skincare episode.

It feels pretty minimalist to me because every day it's just cleaning my face, serum moisturizer, every night, cleaning my face, oh toner in the morning. Okay, yeah, okay, dime. Yeah. Maybe we'll get them to sponsor us someday. That'd be real nice, get even more of a me.

And I say it with the coffee, I wait till they have the big sale and buy enough to get the free shipping, and I too, only buy it six months.

Every six months, I mean, I think that that's one of our goals too, with any affiliates or products that we ever do push, is that we are able to get you all a coupon code for it so that it's like something we actually do recommend, and we can help you get it for a deal.

So that you don't have to wait twice a year.

It works surt me.

Yeah, all right, Well, thank you so much for listening. I hope you found it helpful. And the next time you go to buy something online that you will use one of these options before you just go impulse buy

Worthy or not.

And we really love this one from Kyle Tony, it Happened to be five Stars, says, Finally a finance book that celebrates you as a podcast listener. I already knew a lot of what to expect from this book, but loved seeing it Finally a finance book that celebrates you as a podcast listener. I already knew a lot of what to expect from this book, but love to see laid out so neatly. I love how Jen and Jill encourage you to find what is of value to you

That's so cute. I love that you loved the audiobook. We are hearing that a ton from people, which makes sense because we are podcasters who wrote a book, So.

We loved the audiobook, we loved recording it, and we wanted to do something special for all.

Of our audio files. Yeah. So thanks everyone for listening, thanks for reading our book. If you are enjoying this podcast, please do take a minute to leave us a rating and review. It helps other listeners find us, It helps us. If you've read the book, please leave a rating and review on Amazon. Even if you didn't buy it there, you can still leave a review for it on Amazon, So yeah, or get the book by what you lovebook dot com.

Yeah, by what you lovebook dot Com. Bye Bye Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Sirianni.

Jen Jill. Eric just finished our audio book. Speaking speaking of we've been working on the exterior of our house a ton lately, really still recovering from the hurricane, doing things on our garage to get it ready for the roof. The roof is installed now, but we've got soffits to replace. Blah blah blah. Anyways, he's been listening to our audiobook