Making The Most Of Amazon.com

According to the 2016 Forbes listing of the world’s richest billionaires, Jeff Bezos is the 5^th richest person on Earth. His fortune comes almost entirely from Amazon.com, the online retailer he started in 1994. When it began, Amazon only sold books, but has since grown to sell just about everything.

Their enormous size and purchasing power, and lack of expensive storefronts, means that Amazon often has the best prices to be found on a vast range of products. This has led to consumers, including your trusty Frugalvore authors, to buy more and more "stuff" from them. That said, there are still some ways to save even more money shopping at Amazon and we’ll look at some of them below.

If you purchase a lot from Amazon, and you haven’t already, you should seriously consider signing up for Amazon Prime. At the time this article was written, it cost $99 per year. That annual fee gets you free two-day shipping on most items. In many cases, if the warehouse that ships your item is in the same state as you, you may even get your order delivered the next day. You will quickly get used to this and when you order online from a different retailer you’ll find it drives you crazy when your package takes several days to arrive.

But Amazon Prime doesn’t just stop there, Prime members are also entitled to a long list of other free benefits as well. Many of them will save you money.

After you’ve got Amazon Prime, the next way you can save money is to sign up for the Amazon Prime Store Card. This credit card will give you 5% back every month on all your Amazon purchases, which is pretty darn good. The drawback of this card is that the interest rate (APR) is quite high and is currently about 26%. This means you’ll definitely want to pay off your balance in full every month. There is a way to pay no interest for large purchases for six months, but if you don’t pay it off within that time you’ll get hit with the full deferred six months interest—so probably best to just avoid this possibility and pay in full.

One final way to save money on Amazon is to wait for the best price on an item before purchasing. There is a website called CamelCamelCamel.com, which allows you to view historical price information for most items sold on Amazon, and then enter a target price that CamelCamelCamel will track and then notify you if/when the item reaches that price. Clearly this is only of use if you can hold off purchasing an item until it reaches a better price. If you can wait, it is common to save an additional 5 or 10% on an item using this method.