How to Use Your Phone to Find the Best Deals and Save Money Shopping

Shopping with your phone in hand gives you access to price comparison tools, coupon finders, and cash-back services that didn’t exist a decade ago. Used well, they can save meaningful amounts. Used casually, they take time without saving much. Here’s what’s actually worth your effort.

Price Comparison: The Foundation

Before buying anything significant, compare prices. This is obvious advice but the tools available make it faster than most people think.

Google Shopping (search the product name, click Shopping tab) shows you prices from multiple retailers in seconds. The price history graph feature, visible by clicking on a product, shows whether the current price is actually a deal or just the normal price.

CamelCamelCamel is specifically for Amazon price history and shows you the historical price of any Amazon product with a chart. Products that are “on sale” on Amazon are often just at their normal price with a crossed-out higher fake “original” price. The price history exposes this immediately.

Browser Extensions That Do the Work Automatically

Honey (from PayPal) is a browser extension that automatically finds and applies coupon codes at checkout and tracks price drops on items you’re watching. It’s free and genuinely finds valid coupon codes a significant portion of the time. On mobile, the Honey app version works with some shopping apps.

Capital One Shopping does similar things and also compares prices at other retailers automatically when you’re on a product page.

Cash-Back Apps and Services

TopCashback and Quidco (UK-focused) and Rakuten (US-focused) offer cash back for purchases made through their portals or browser extensions. The mechanism: you click through their link to a retailer, buy something, and they receive an affiliate commission from the retailer which they share with you.

The amounts are small per transaction (1-10%) but add up over time for regular online shopping. Worth using for any significant purchase or regular shopping.

In-Store Price Matching

Many retailers have price match policies they don’t advertise prominently. Use your phone in-store: find the same product cheaper at a competitor, show the store’s app or website, and ask for the price match. Major retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Currys (UK), and John Lewis (UK) all have price match policies.

Google Lens scanning a product barcode in-store shows you online prices immediately — useful for checking whether the in-store price is competitive before buying.

Grocery Savings

Supermarket apps (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Lidl, Kroger, Whole Foods, Target) have weekly deals and coupons available only through the app. Check these before your weekly shop and plan around what’s reduced.

Flipp aggregates supermarket flyers and lets you browse weekly deals from multiple stores without downloading each app separately.

The Cashback Credit Card + Cash-Back Portal Combination

For any significant online purchase: using a cash-back credit card (1-5% on purchases) through a cash-back portal (1-10%) stacks both rewards. Buying a $500 appliance through a cash-back portal link while paying with a 2% cash-back credit card gets you 3-12% back on a purchase you were making anyway.

What’s Not Worth the Time

Coupon apps that require extensive searching to find applicable coupons. If finding the coupon takes 15 minutes, it needs to save significant money to be worth it.

Extreme couponing approaches that require buying items you didn’t need because they were discounted. Saving 40% on something you wouldn’t have bought otherwise isn’t saving — it’s spending.

Price alerts on everything: setting price alerts for items you don’t urgently need and then buying when the alert triggers (even if you’d forgotten about it) is the apps nudging you to spend, not helping you save.

Views: 0