SmartMoney offers three tips to improve some of the most common down-sides of shopping online: too many results, not enough discounts, and dreaded shipping fees.

Searching for products online is a problem that not even Google can solve. “Type the phrase ‘digital camera’ into Google, and you get 62 million results.” Unfortunately, SmartMoney doesn’t have an answer either (and neither do we), other than to use specific keywords based on specs or materials in order to narrow the results. It’s possible that so-called “social shopping” sites like Crowdstorm may improve the experience by putting human filters between you and the world market, but as it’s still in closed beta, we’ll have to wait and see.

If you’re a registered customer at a particular online store, try logging out and deleting your cookies, then visiting the store as an anonymous “new customer”—many companies offer the best discounts to prospective customers.

With shipping, you can either look for free shipping offers on sites like dealnews.com or type the store’s name and “free shipping” into Google to see whether there are any third-party offers available. SmartMoney also suggests you wait until the day after Thanksgiving, when many online stores will offer free-shipping specials to boost sales during the holiday season.

“Hassle-Free Web Shopping” [SmartMoney]
(Photo: Getty)

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