It’s amazing that coupons also exist for online purchases, or are sometimes exclusive to online purchases, helping endlessly with big ticket items, or even just in justifying the cost of shipping on something you really want. Coupons can be messy when you have a drawer full of them for local businesses, expiring on you unexpectedly, or being overused and discontinued. Add the infinite number of online shops and their coupons to that, plus sales they offer, and it’s truly too much to manage. It can be impossible to keep track of sales when each site has different ones at different times of year, and coupons are great, unless you’re not sure you’re using the best ones in the moment. What can you do to consistently save on your online purchases, whether it be little bits here and there, or hundreds of dollars at a time? Google Chrome plugins — applications that work directly with the web browser — can help you find the best coupon or deal for the item you’re looking for, or the site you’re visiting, exactly when you need them. In the list below, we explore some of the best plugins for saving you money while you shop online. Check them all out, and download the ones that apply to you so you can start saving ASAP!
Honey
With over 9 million members, Honey is a very popular plugin with a simple premise — as you shop online, Honey searches for valid coupons and coupon codes for the site you’re on, and lets you know what they are with a simple click. Once you see the codes available, and which deal works best for your purchase, Honey applies the code to your purchase, and you save money right then and there.
InvisibleHand
While it provides coupon codes much in the way Honey does while you’re shopping, the plugin InvisibleHand has its real money-saving benefits in its automatic price comparison. While you look at a particular item, InvisibleHand quietly searches the web on your behalf, and lets you know via an alert if the item can be found for less money on another site. Checking for prices in real time, you can take advantage of deals you might not otherwise know about, and can maybe learn about sites that are consistently giving you better prices on your favorite items, so you can shop there first. InvisibleHand’s great price comparison ability also carries over to rental car, hotel, and airfare searches, which most plugins don’t do. This is a huge benefit whether you’re a frequent traveler or not. So perhaps Honey is a better plugin for coupons, and saving money while purchasing multiple items at the same time — InvisibleHand is here to make sure you get the lowest price on absolutely any individual thing you’re buying, making it most useful for big purchases, or one-off items. To get your cheapest individual purchases, get InvisibleHand at the Chrome Web Store here.
Keepa
Ebates
If you not only want coupons, but also cash back on your purchases, it’s worth checking out Ebates, the Chrome plugin that gets commission from sending you to certain stores, and then shares that commission with you as cash back. Shop as you normally would on the sites you like, and Ebates will let you know if you can get cash back on purchases, and automatically applies the deal when you check out. Ebates also helps you see cash back rates from search results pages on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and finds you coupons for sites that it automatically applies as well, so you never miss out on a deal.
Piggy
Sometimes sites offer multiple coupons or discounts at once, and it can be hard to know which single coupon, or which combination of coupons, will get you the best deal. Enter Piggy, the Google Chrome plugin that finds all the discounts available on an item, and, at checkout, tries every combination of codes to see which one gets you the best deal and saves you the most money. Piggy takes away all the guesswork of coupon codes, saving you time as well as money. It even gets you cash back rewards at thousands of stores, getting you the money via check four times a year. Piggy doesn’t allow you to decide for yourself if a particular coupon combination is the best one for you; it can only aim for the lowest price, and applies that automatically. So if you like having a little more control over your shopping experience, being able to reserve limited discounts for future purchases, or if you just enjoy making coupon calculations on your own, Piggy might not be the plugin for you. For those of us that want to take away the guesswork and just save money, Piggy is a perfect fit! Get it in the Chrome Web Store here.
