Shopping? 3 plugins that save you money, headaches
This is just a quick tip piece on three free plugins or sites that will save you money, require no commitment or money or jack. I’m not going to dive into the merits of each of these in depth mostly because I’m tired, at work on Friday after a night where a malfunction caused my daughter’s gentle nighttime lullaby to start blasting out at a high volume resulting in a less than perfect night’s sleep.
Wikibuy
Grab the plugin, find something on Amazon, a wikibuy hover window will pop up in the lower left corner about 15 seconds after the page is done loading and it may or may not find a better price for you.
The wikibuy plugin asked a few questions on setup such as whether I had Amazon Prime, what zip code I was in, and other things to determine whether I was going to get a deal or it wasn’t worth it when shipping, tax, and the like was factored in.
No more seeing a price $15 cheaper that didn’t include $21 of shipping, handling, and delaying.
You can grab the Chrome plugin here.
Fakespot
Tired of products with 500 reviews saying “I received this in exchange for my unbiased review” who all have never put less than four stars for something they got for free? You can grab the Fakespot plugin here, or just go to their site and enter the URL of the product you’re interested in finding out whether it’s a bunch of garbage reviews.
Also claims to work for spotting fake Yelp reviews, although Yelp does a pretty decent job of keeping those off in most markets.
Honey
Has a bunch of checkout codes for various stores, results vary. I maybe have saved $3 using it in two months. Some people and sites it works better for than others. You can install the Chrome plugin here.
What’s the gotcha?
I’ve been using these for a while. I haven’t directly seen anything via these plugins. Wikibuy I believe makes money by finding you a cheaper product and then pocketing a commission. Fakespot and Honey I have no idea where their income comes from.
Wikibuy additionally appears to keep track of what you’ve been looking at on Amazon as when I hit their web page in an attempt to get a screenshot for this article all my previous Amazon searches seemed to be hanging out there.
Get em. Don’t like or use them, uninstall them.
