The 10 Best Chrome Extensions for Holiday Shopping
Reading Time: 4 minutesUse these extensions to gift yourself as you shop for others.
Long gone are the days of driving to the mall, battling crowds, and fighting tooth and nail for the last toy on the shelf. Holiday shopping is all online now, and that presents new varieties of stress. How do you know if you’re getting the best deal? Has this item been cheaper in the past? Are you missing out on extra rewards? The answer to all three is likely ‘yes,’ but don’t worry: You can use these 10 Chrome extensions to check for coupons, save money, earn money, and even invest in your future.
Given the nature of these extensions, you’ll find some feature crossovers here and there. Some of these apps want to do everything, so there may be some redundancies in the mix. But each one excels at at least one unique ability to aid you in your holiday shopping (and throughout the year).
Formally known as Ebates, Rakuten is a cash back rewards app that earns you money when shopping with participating retailers. It’s fairly simple to use: If you’re on a website that supports Rakuten, you’ll see a pop-up appear letting you know how much cash back the stores allows, and offering a button that activates Rakuten then and there. Then, you continue to shop on the site, and anything you buy contributes to your Rakuten cash back. You’ll receive the cash back in the form of a check (no gimmicks!), but you do need to earn at least $15 before the check will be sent.
Unfortunately, Rakuten’s biggest deals have come and gone following Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but there are still plenty of opportunities to take advantage of. If you’re already going to shop with these stores, why not make a little cash on the side? Not to mention, the app searches for available coupon codes to add at checkout, a feature central to another app you may have heard of …
Honestly, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of Honey. The app is masterful at mass advertising (even if the advertisements themselves are anything but). If you somehow avoided one of these ads in your internet experience, here’s the deal: Honey automatically looks for coupons codes whenever you check out on a website. It saves you from having to dig through those shady coupon sites, trying each and every code only to find nothing works.
It’s no guarantee: If a site doesn’t have a valid coupon code to use, Honey can’t magically save you money. However, if it can find a code, it’ll add it to your checkout. Honey claims its users save on average $126 a year, so it’s worth having in your shopping arsenal.
If you plan to shop on Amazon this holiday season, add The Camelizer to your browser. Built by the team at CamelCamelCamel, The Camelizer allows you to track the prices of Amazon products over time, and to set up alerts when an item drops in price. It’s perfect for understanding whether an item’s price at the given moment is a good deal, or if Amazon has had it cheaper in the past. If the latter, choose a price you’d like to buy it at, and The Camelizer will let you know if it ever goes that low again.
Speaking of Amazon, don’t you hate it when you buy something based on good reviews and it turns out to be junk? Fake reviews are a plague on sites like Amazon’s, and Fakespot shines a light on them. With the extension, you can weed out fake reviews on Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Sephora, Shopify, and Walmart. Plus, it throws price tracking in the mix, just for added convenience.
Don’t bother hopping from store to store comparing deals as you go. With OctoShop, you can see all retailers who carry the item you’re looking for, as well as what they’re charging. If the best price is out of stock, as is the case with the B&H’s PS5 in the screenshot above, OctoShop can notify you when the store has the item again so you can buy it up as quickly as possible. You can also set alerts for when items hit a certain price, as well as earn cash back at eligible stores.
Capital One Shopping does it all: coupons codes at checkout, price tracking across sites, and, best of all, cash back. But Capital One Shopping doesn’t do cash back rewards like everyone else. Instead of getting your rewards in the form of cash, you earn Capital One points towards gift cards. You can pick from popular retailers like Walmart, eBay, Nike, L.L.Bean, and Barnes & Noble, among many others.
Klarna has its similarities to Honey, namely that it searches for coupon codes to add at checkout. However, Klarna’s unique trait is allows you to split your purchase into four interest-free payments, which can help alleviate the burden of holiday shopping on this month’s credit card statement.
That said, be careful with any payment plan. It’s great this one is interest free, but it can be tempting to stack more purchases at once than you normally would because the initial payment is less. Klarna adds a late fee of up to $7 per missed payment, but never charges above 25% of your order value. If used right, though, it can be a helpful way to manage all the gifts you need to buy.
If you want to get the best deals on your holiday shopping, but you also want to make smart decisions when it comes to the stores you buy from, Cultivate is your friend: The app points you towards local stores as well as stores with good reputations. Instead of earning cash back as you shop, you earn money for charity, which embodies the true meaning of the season a bit more than a little extra spending money.
Karma does what a lot of shopping extensions do: It applies available coupons upon checkout, and earns you cash back when available. The big plus to Karma, however, is its wishlist feature. With the wishlist, you can add all of the items you’re interested in to across multiple retailers into one comprehensive list. Karma then tracks the prices for all the items in your list, and lets you know when it’s the best time to buy any given product. It’s a great way to organize the gifts you’re interested in buying this year without having to jump through hoops or open up a Google spreadsheet.
You’re going to invest in your friends and family this holiday season, but don’t forget to invest in yourself. Acorns Earn is the product of Acorn, a company that rounds up your change from each purchase and invest that small amount of extra money into a portfolio for you. The idea is similar here, only from a cash back perspective: When you make purchases with qualifying stores, you’ll earn rewards that can be invested in your Acorns account.