Suzanne Humphries
There are ways to save money when you’re shopping online beyond waiting for a good sale to roll around. We found a few Chrome extensions specifically designed to sniff out coupon codes and other discounts, then automatically apply them to your cart before you check out.
In addition to finding coupon codes, these extensions usually have other benefits, like rewards programs and price tracking. If you’d rather manually track prices yourself, you might also want to install The Camelizer extension from CamelCamelCamel. This service stores historical pricing data, and is a great way to tell whether a sale is only going to save you a few bucks, or if it’s the best price ever offered on a product. It’s an invaluable tool that, when paired with one of these extensions, is sure to save you money on anything from dinner to electronics.
Update, 12/6/21: Verified products and links are still good. WikiBuy is now Capital One Shopping.
Price Tracking and Automatic Codes: Honey
Coupons and Cash Back: Rakuten
Real-Time Deal Alerts: Capital One Shopping
See the Latest Deals: SlickDeals
Price Tracking and Automatic Codes: Honey
You’ve probably heard about Honey (Free) from an ad, but it is genuinely a terrific way to save money while shopping online at over 30,000 sites. The popular extension kicks in just before you pay for what’s in your cart. It scans the web for valid coupon codes, tries each one out, and automatically applies the best one. It also has exclusive promo codes you won’t be able to find anywhere else.
With Honey, you can also earn rewards called Honey Gold. The more you shop, the more Gold you’ll accrue, which you can ultimately apply towards gift cards from your favorite stores. It can also compare sellers on Amazon, factoring in Prime status and shipping, and it has built-in price tracking tools. Honey also has a more general Droplist feature that lets you add an item to your Droplist, then receive a notification when a price drop is detected at other stores.
Coupons and Cash Back: Rakuten
Formerly known as Ebates, Rakuten (Free) not only does a good job finding applicable coupons for your purchases, it also lets you earn cashback on some of them. It shows you cashback rates for a product when you look it up on a search engine so you can compare rates at different stores before clicking on one, and lets you know if there’s another store with better cashback rates than the one you’re currently on before you go through with your purchase.
The Rakuten extension automatically finds and applies codes when you’re ready to check out—you don’t have to do anything extra. It works seamlessly at popular stores like Walmart, Kohl’s, Target, and others.
Real-Time Deal Alerts: Capital One Shopping
Capital One Shopping (Free) is a tool from Capital One that instantly applies coupons to your cart at checkout and alerts you to the best deals from popular online retailers. The extension automatically looks for better prices when you’re shopping at places like Best Buy and Target, and it’ll pop up and alert you if it finds a better price elsewhere, including tax and other shipping details and costs.
The extension also lets you earn loyalty rewards from popular online retailers, which can be saved up and eventually redeemed for a gift card on Capital One Shopping. It’s an easy way to potentially save big bucks on your favorite products, and all you need to do is have fun shopping.
See the Latest Deals: SlickDeals
SlickDeals is already one of the premiere sites through which you can find up-to-date deals on all kinds of products, so it makes sense that the SlickDeals Chrome extension (Free) would also be an excellent resource for helping you save money. Backed by an enormous online shopping community, SlickDeals brings you the latest deals and coupon codes, and even automatically applies the codes during checkout at popular retailers like Lowe’s, GAP, Dell, Target, Kohl’s, Walmart, and more.
