How to Become a Better Shopper

Shopping comes naturally to some and unnaturally to others. Regardless of your opinion of shopping, it’s all something we need to do and something that we can all get better at doing. If you practice patience and are aware of the seasonality and cycles of sales you can save a lot of money and ideally become a better shopper for it.

Practicing Patience

Practicing patience isn’t always easy but if we can perfect it, it’ll help us save money in the long term. If you want to save you need to wait for sale opportunities and wait to buy during the right time of year. Furniture is weirdly cheaper during various holidays like President’s week so see if you can get some special deals during this time if you plan on buying any and check out prices during non-sales to compare. When you are mindful of the cyclicality of consumerism in the U.S. you can more effectively become a better shopper. When you practice patience, you can make sure you are better prepared for major purchases and make sure you are shopping at an opportune time and not missing out on any potential sale opportunities.

When you are more mindful of the seasonality of sales you can always take advantage of good deals and not miss out due to carelessness. If you want to buy a Lexus and Lexus has a tremendous sale every December, it might make sense to wait until then or even go the contrarian approach and see if you can buy any unsold inventory during a slow month at the car dealership. This will help you go against the crowd and be a source of business for a company when things are slow or you can look to try to “be first” when the big sale starts out if you are looking for something specific. Both options could prove effective.

Googling Coupons Codes

If you’re doing any online shopping make it a habit of searching for promotional codes or coupon codes at checkout. It never hurts and it could help save you 10%, 20%, apply free shipping, etc. This literally shouldn’t take more than a handful of minutes and the payoff could be quite significant. A quick google query will shop you top results for recently used coupon codes (hopefully you aren’t duped with fake codes) and you can simply apply at checkout to get discount.

Sales Do Not Necessarily Mean Deep Discounts

Consumers sometimes get fooled by a price reduction and sales. If the price was previously increased just to be lowered for a special sales event, it might not be as heavily discounted as you think. This is most likely to happen during big sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Although there are sure to be good deals to be had during a special sales event this doesn’t necessarily mean that you getting a better price than you would if you were to wait until after the New Year. Try to be mindful of this going into certain big event sales.

Buying After the Holiday Season

There is a lot to be said about how much money is spent during the Holiday season in the United States of America. Leading up to the months before the New Years, consumers spend a lot and shop a lot. Many of these items are gifts for others, which a good percentage of end up getting returned. Those returned items and the time period following this shopping overload can be a great opportunity to buy. Since consumers are mostly “shopped-out”, retail locations have a greater incentive to offer discounted items on leftovers (they typically want to eliminate this season’s inventory) and sell the remainder of their merchandise. If you have the patience to wait until after the season is over to buy it can help you save a ton of money.

Contrarian Approach

It’s said that the best time to buy a winter coat is during the summer time. This is usually the case since not many consumers are actively looking to buy a winter coat during July. Due to this, supply is most likely to be at its highest while demand is likely to be at its lowest. You can capitalize on this high supply and low demand and hopefully get a winter coat for cheaper than you might have been able to otherwise get it for.

Email Sign Up

A lot of websites offer a discount code for customers that sign up to their email lists or subscribe to their websites. You might sometimes receive a discount code of up to 10%, 15% or 20% off. Some sites even allow these discount codes to be combined with other discount codes so the savings could definitely be substantial in this scenario. This is an easy low-hanging fruit savings tip since the amount of effort required to sign up to email lists is quit nominal.

Become Aware and Extra Sensitive to the Price of Goods You Consistently Buy

If you’re finding that you consistently buy certain good and certain staple products are always in your shopping cart, try to become more aware of their prices when you purchase them. When we pay closer attention to the price of goods we can more easily notice trends and patterns and take advantage of seasonality and the cyclicality of grocery shopping. If you know that Cherries typically go on sale at the end of June, you might not want to start buying them in early June. You can wait a little and typically buy double the amount!

Shopping can be fun but it’s not always easy to capitalize on savings unless we practice patience and are more mindful of the sale cycle. Doing this will allow us to become better acquainted shoppers and better savers and allow us to make better financial decisions.