Tips for Online Shopping: How To Buy Things Cheaper

These days everybody shops online. You can buy everything from an online store, and more and more people prefer to shop online instead of visiting a local store. As a matter of fact, shopping online provides a lot of benefits, including convenience, better selections, more comfort, time saving, better prices and more.

As more and more people shop online, online shoppers have figured out a lot of tips for saving money. For example, you should always consolidate your purchases instead of buying from different online stores. You can also use online price comparison services to locate good deals or discount for the stuff that you plan to buy. You can also visit online coupon sites to find coupon codes that might save you a lot of money for your next online purchase. Besides, you can choose to become a member for some shopping sites, which offer big discounts for registered members. In addition, before putting stuff into your online shopping cart, you can check on eBay to see if that product is available there with a much lower price.

However, there is a less well-known online shopping trick, which might save you a lot of money.

Online Shopping Websites Might Adjust Their Prices Based on Shopper’s Locations

Before we go into details about this trick, let me tell you that many online stores shows different prices to users from different locations. When you visit a website, the website knows where you are currently visiting from based on your IP address. Therefore, online shopping websites might adjust their prices based on shopper’s locations. Also, online stores might apply some restrictions on available items based on visitors’ locations. They might show more items for customers from certain countries (or states) and hide some items from visitors from other countries (or states). In addition, online stores’ promotion programs are often different for different locations. They might only limit their discount or promotion to certain locations, again, based on users’ IP address.

You Can Use VPN to Bypass Geo-Targeting or Geo-Restriction to Buy Things Cheaper

Is it possible to bypass this kind of geo-targeting or geo-restriction while shopping online? The answer is yes. Actually you can use VPN to do that. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. People use VPN for different purposes, such as to increase online security, to protect privacy or to bypass Internet contents blocking etc. For example, in China, many western websites are blocked, so people use a China VPN to unblock those sites. Also, some people living in other countries (such as Australia) use VPN to watch Netflix’s U.S. programs.

VPN can be used for online shopping as well. Using VPN to buy things cheaper is a popular trick. A good low-cost VPN (for example, ExpressVPN) can do the job.

You Can Use VPN to Hide Your Real Location to Buy Things Cheaper

Online shoppers can connect to a VPN service and pretend he or she is from a different location. As a result, he or she might be able to see different prices, different products or services and possibly different shopping discounts. This trick might save you a lot of money when you shop online. 

Here's the steps for using VPN to buy things cheaper. To use this trick, you first need to sign up for a VPN service. There’re some VPN review and testing sites that recommends best VPN providers. Actually you can even use free VPN services for this purpose. Once you have a VPN account, you can connect to a VPN server. Most VPN services offer different VPN servers located in different parts of the world. For example, you can choose a VPN server in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong or VPN for China (in Chinese, VPN中国). Therefore, you can connect to VPN servers in a different location to “pretend” you are from that location. You can even try different locations to see if the pricing changes and whether there are special discount or promotion available to that location.

Other Benefits of Using VPN for Online Shopping

We have shown that using VPN you can buy things cheaper online. In fact, not only can VPN save you some money while doing online shopping, it can also increase your online security, because all traffic will be encrypted, so your online activity will become more secure. For example, sometimes people do online shopping using public Wifi (in coffee shops, for instance). Using a public wifi might be dangerous because hackers using the same Wifi might be able to steal your personal info or credit card numbers. However, if you use a VPN, this won't be a problem and you can enjoy safer online shopping even on a public Wifi.

Conclusion:

There are many benefits of using VPN for online shopping. In addition to being more secure, you can sometimes get better deals by using VPN to hide your real location. Hope you can have a better online shopping experience with a VPN and using VPN to buy things cheaper!