Archive for the ‘Shopping Strategies’ Category

Seri­ously, folks, when you start to see Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions in all the stores, you can tell that Hal­loween can’t be far away! It used to be that retail­ers waited until Thanks­giv­ing to roll out their Christ­mas sales, but every year it gets ear­lier and ear­lier. With well over 100 retail­ers on our Sho­pOn­line shop­ping pages, my email box is flooded every day with announce­ments from stores about their pre-Christmas sales that are going on right now.

I have two objec­tives with this site. The first is that I want to earn tons of com­mis­sions for all of my part­ner char­i­ties. I want  com­mis­sion checks to be rolling through here on their way to the wor­thy orga­ni­za­tions that we sup­port through shop­ping on these pages.

But my sec­ond objec­tive is that you, the shop­per, get the absolute best deal that you can when you shop online here. I appre­ci­ate you using this site to help fund these char­i­ties, and I know that the char­i­ties them­selves are thank­ful for the rev­enue that comes their way as a result of your shop­ping, but we all want you to not spend a penny more than you have to when you shop here, so I want to tell you about these sales.

The num­ber of sales that are run­ning online now are just too numer­ous to list. You can pretty safely assume that almost every­one is hav­ing a Christ­mas sale of some kind right now. The best time to shop seems to be on Sat­ur­days, Sun­days, and Mon­days. More stores run spe­cials on these days than any other time of the week. Another way to save while you shop here is to find online dis­count codes, write them down, and come back to your charity’s shop­ping page here at Sho­pOn­line and use them at check­out with your retailer. You get the check­out dis­count, but your char­i­tys­till gets the com­mis­sion from your purchases.

Here’s another smart money tip — save some of your Christ­mas shop­ping money for after Christ­mas. This is a les­son I have to re-learn every year. After-Christmas sales are even bet­ter than before-Christmas sales. All the retail­ers are look­ing to dump their over­stocked mer­chan­dise as quickly as they can after Christ­mas. You can really scoop up some great deals in the cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing Christ­mas. We were able to give late gifts to sev­eral friends and busi­ness asso­ciates that we didn’t think we could afford to buy for at Christ­mas, because we got at really deep dis­counts by wait­ing a week (or two or three) after Christmas.

So if you’ve got to have the lat­est and great­est Christ­mas wish list gizmo, by all means, buy it now before the stores run out. But if you’re the kind of per­son who can delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion (espe­cially if delay­ing brings the oppor­tu­nity for even more grat­i­fi­ca­tion), here’s a bright idea for you — the Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian church cel­e­brates Christ­mas on Jan­u­ary 6th. Not being Ortho­dox myself, I’ve always thought this to be strange (most likely because I’ve never heard their rea­son for it), but from a shop­ping per­spec­tive it just sounds down­right smart. So buy presents for the lit­tle kids on your list so they have some­thing they can tear open under the Christ­mas tree on Christ­mas morn­ing, but strike a deal with the grown-ups on your shop­ping list to cel­e­brate Ortho­dox Christ­mas this year — and save a pile of cash.