The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. Bruce Lee
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In a previous post, how much we need to retire, we mentioned that we were looking at ways to cut our expenses with laser-like focus. Since the holidays are a few months away, we figured we’d start with how we can save money while shopping online.
Just like all the posts in this journey, we had planned to put everything about saving money while shopping online into one article. Then proceeded to write a twenty-one page blog, when printed to PDF… And that wasn’t all of it. We had already made some notes of additional things We wanted to add.
So, we decided to break the online shopping post into smaller pieces. Future posts will cover:
- Discount Gift Cards (Saved $328 so far in 2025)
- Cashback Portals (Earned 108.48 so far in 2025)
- Miscellaneous other things
- Amazon Subscribe & Save (Saved $159 so far in 2025)
Thinking About Buying Something
Before we go to buy something, we actually press the pause button and let it marinade (assuming it isn’t something critical). We see if we really want to buy this thing. Sometimes it is really just an impulse buy. Letting is sit for even twenty-four hours can make us really consider its value.
There is something called the opportunity cost. If I spend my precious dollars on this thing, then I won’t have the opportunity to spend those dollars on something else in the future.
When we were starting our minimalism journey, we watched thousands upon thousands of dollars being donated and thrown in the trash. That could have been trips for us or shaved years off our working lives. Anna then started listing several of those items on sites like Facebook Marketplace and Mercari to recoup a few of those dollars, but that was taking hours a day. So we determined if an item wasn’t worth at least $50, it wasn’t worth it.
Not only did we waste a bunch of money, but we wasted a bunch of time buying the thing, storing the thing, and then figuring how to get rid of it. Plus the regret of buying the thing.
I Wants List
So, when it comes to buying something (not urgent), we created an “I Wants List”. We add the things we think we want to the list. This allows us to not forget we wanted something, but also gives us some time to think, do we actually want it? Will this actually provide us with value one week later, one month later, one year later, or five years later.
Having an I Wants list is also great for birthdays and holidays. It takes a lot of pressure off the gifter to try to think of something we might want.
If it isn’t an urgent purchase, we typically wait until the end of the year because that is when the big sales happen. This also helps prevent impulse buying because we are letting things sit for a little bit before making the actual purchase. Periodically, I (Adam) will review my previous year’s lists and chuckle at the things I thought I wanted to buy. For example:
- Backpacks (I used to have a different one for every day of the week)
- Fun belts for my pants (which are covered by my shirt and no one sees them…)
- Box/Boxes to put my watches in while traveling (don’t wear watches like I used to)
- So many shirts, tech gadgets, and outdoor survival devices
But as the holidays approach, are those items on our I wants list actually cheaper? Or did the vendor/seller increase the price the month before and then drop it back down to the regular sales prices?
Price Tracking Extensions
Let’s talk about two extensions we use to track prices, Honey and Keepa.
If you are looking for something easy to use, Honey is probably the extension you want to use. It can tell you the historical prices, you can be notified of price changes, automatically add coupons, and even earn you some cash back.
If you want to get super nerdy and analytical, then Keepa might appeal more to you, but it only works for Amazon purchases.
Honey
Honey works with hundreds of online retailers and has four benefits: price history, drop list, coupons, and cashback. In a future post, we’ll dive deeper into other cashback portals where we can save even more money or earn additional airline or credit card points.
After creating an account, installing the browser extension, and logging in, it is time to go shopping.
We know Honey is working when we see the orange tile and white ‘h’ on the side after browsing to an item we are interested in buying.
Price History
If we hover our cursor over the ‘h’, there is a link to See Price History.
This allows us to see the history of the item over the last 30, 60, or 120 days and if the vendor used any sneaky sales tactics.
In this example, which I captured last year leading up to holiday sales, the price was about $39. Then the vendor increased and decreased the price several times to its peak price on Nov 12th at $54.97, before dropping the price by almost $16 to where it was the month prior. So, was it really on sale?
Drop List
If there is an item we do like, we can add it to the drop list. This will track the price of the item. When the price drops, we’ll receive an email notification.
Throughout the year, we’ll add non-urgent items to the drop list. When the price goes down, we can decide if we really want the item.
This happened to me recently. I’m a fan of the VMODA Crossfade headphones. Anna gifted me the gen one version fourteen years ago. Since then, they have been rock solid, and still sound amazing. The problem though, the battery life was getting shorter and shorter and one of the sides would randomly cut out until I charged it back up. I haven’t been in a rush to get a new pair and have been keeping an eye on a new pair for years. One day, I got an alert that there was a $100 price drop. This spills into a future post, but I bought a discount Amazon gift card (7% off), and bought the headphones. As a result, instead of paying $300 for a pair of VMODA Crossfade 3 headphones, I paid $186.
Side note, it will also suggest retailers that may have the same product, but less expensive.
Coupons
One of the features I love about this extension is coupons. When we go to check out, several retailers will have a box for coupons. Honey will automatically try all the coupons it knows to see if any of them work.
Cashback
The Honey extension can also provide cashback in the form of PayPal rewards. As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be diving much deeper into this topic in a future post with a couple of other extensions.
In this example, I went to Walmart. Depending on the item(s) purchased, I could get between 0.1% to 1.1% cashback (PayPal rewards). So, if I purchased an item worth $100 and with 1% cashback, I’d get 100 PayPal rewards. The rewards can then be transferred to the PayPal account, at any point in time, we used when setting up Honey. 100 PayPal rewards equals $1. Over time, each little transaction adds up. We’ve earned $330.28 in the last 13 months.
Keepa
Warning, this section gets really nerdy.
An alternative to Honey is Keepa, which only works with Amazon. Keepa doesn’t require a log in to use their site, but does require a login for the browser extension. Keepa offers price tracking, price drop notifications, and variations of the intended product (color, size, etc), but doesn’t have a coupon testing or cashback option. For cashback, we actually use a couple of other extension that usually have higher cashback amounts. I’ll talk about them in a future post. So I’m not too upset about not having that feature.
Price Tracking
For price tracking and price drop notifications, we need to use their browser extension.
Using the VMODA Crossfade 3 headphones again, under the product description, we’ll see a graph of the price over the last three months (default setting). If you want to change the timeframe, in the bottom right corner of the graph, you can select Day, Week, Month, 3 Months, Year, or entire duration that the item was listed.
Hovering our cursor over the graph, we can see the price that Amazon has it listed at ($299.99) and the price from third party vendors selling on Amazon ($279.99).
There is one more number on the graph called the Buy Box. This is also called the Feature Offer. This number is more helpful for people/companies looking at selling products on Amazon, and takes this post much deeper than I’d like to go.
At a high level, there can be multiple sellers for a single product. When Amazon shows you a product, on the backend, those vendors are competing for the sale. When you click Add to Cart or Buy Now and complete the purchase, who ever won that competition, gets the sale. If you can win the Buy Box/Feature Offer more times than your competitors, you can capture more sales. There can be times when the sales prices and the Buy Box price different allowing for an additional margin of profit to be made on a product. Sellers can then determine if they want to increase/decrease their inventory or increase/decrease their price based on this information.
Price Tracking
The next tab over is Track product. Just like with Honey, you can setup notifications about price changes for a product with a duration from the next two weeks to the next ten years. You can also specify how much the price should drop before being notified along with new and used prices from third party vendors.
Variations
The last item talk about for this post is variations. Products come in different colors, sizes, etc. The variations tab allows you to see different versions, their price (Amazon, Buy Box, and New price), their ratings history (number of ratings), and reviews history (number of reviews left on Amazon).
Wrap Up
If it isn’t an urgent purchase, we typically let the item marinade for a bit. That could be a few days to a few months or years in the case of my headphones. This ensures that we actually want the item vs an impulse buy. Once we’ve committed to making a purchase, we want to ensure we are getting the best possible price. Using tools like Honey and Keepa can help us verify that is actually true.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how we are able to buy gift cards at a discount to save us more money, before we actually commit to buying it.
