Tricks to limit spending on Amazon

[gwendally]

Do you want to know how much you've spent on Amazon last year? Ha! Don't you wish. Amazon recently removed the ability to download your order history.

So I don't have a quick trick to give you. Instead, I have a few ideas for how to get the most benefit and the least harm out of Amazon.

The first idea is to track your spending a bit. Mindfulness

Comments

[crazyburro]

just a note - I often order things we need on Amazon all at once, then have them show up in 20 different packages of mismatched size. One time it was a watch battery in a large box.

[_evalution]

Yes! This drives me the most insane. I ordered two padded cases for laptops/chromebooks for the school year. I ordered at the same time from the same company. They came in separate boxes two days apart! Even when I click the "ship in fewer boxes" option, I feel like I get so many things individually.

[belleweather]

Ordering asstons of books for our kids homeschooling curriculum, though, we've found that often for new-ish titles Thriftbooks and TextbookRush are far better than Amazon if you don't want to buy new. Even when the prices are relatively close, Thriftbooks shipping is $3.99 per order and free over $35, where as for Amazon I need to pay $3.99 for every used book I want shipped. When the curriculum requires 40+ books per kid and the library isn't an option (10% of families here are currently homeschooling and there are THREE fully-secular open-and-go homeschooling curricula on the market. You can't even imagine the hold-time for any of the books they use in our local library system.), it makes a giant difference.

[_evalution]

I recently got the Chase Prime Rewards card as well, and feel like it's been a good choice for me. I have had a good amount of rewards to redeem because I do so much shopping in Amazon. One other thing about Amazon that maybe isn't a business perk but just a personal aside is Amazon Smile. For example, my kid's school is my charity of choice, and most of my orders can generate contributions to them.

[nervhq7]

For books, more and more, I've been turning to ebay (of all places). As they have most of what I'm looking for, for substantially less than new (or even used) prices on Amazon (about 80% of the time).