A Consuming Experience: saving money

Showing posts with label saving money. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Help make 080 calls free from mobile phones!

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom intends to make calls to 080 and 116 numbers free from all telephones, fixed and mobile, with
03 to be the only non-geographic number range linked to the price of a call to a geographic number (ie an 01/02 number).

But this is only its intention at the moment, it may change its mind. So if you want calls to 080 numbers to be free from your mobile phone, you've got until 28 May to respond to Ofcom's consultation to tell Ofcom that you agree, yes please!

It's been a big bugbear of mine for years, that calling supposedly freefone 0800 phone numbers in the UK is not free on most mobile networks - ie it doesn't come out of your allowance of minutes if you're on a monthly plan, instead you actually get charged extra by the phone company for making 'free' calls from your smartphone or other mobile phone.

Hence the rise and popularity of services like SayNoto0870 and apps like my pal Simon Maddox's 0870 app.

I hope lots of people will respond to Ofcom so that they change the current consumer-unfriendly situation. Please pass it on!

Saturday, 28 May 2011

Travel more cheaply on London public transport - online tool

Update: this blog post has been mentioned on the BBC site, thanks @TomSEdwards!

This online tool calculates the cheapest Transport for London ticket or Travel card for travel in Zones 1 and 2 by bus, Tube or DLR (Docklands Light Railway).

I created it based on data from the graph by University College researcher Neal Lathia (@neal_lathia). Neal Lathia's blog post summarises the 2011 research paper from which the data was derived, by N. Lathia, L. Capra on Mining Mobility Data to Minimise Travellers' Spending on Public Transport (links to abstract and paper are on his publications page).

I heard about this research via BBC News (Tom Edwards): consumers don't always buy the most cost-effective ticket or travelcard for their travel needs (surprise surprise) so hopefully my tool, based on that valuable research, will help some passengers.

Of course, as and when prices changes, the interactive decision tree might not be accurate anymore, but here's hoping that the researchers will keep updating their graph - if they produce a new graph when TfL change their fare prices, I'll update the tool too.

I produced the cheapest London public transport ticket or Travelcard calculator using the Interactive Decision Tree tool by Warren and Josh.

Thanks also to 24 Ways for their info on how to use Google App Engine to host the files and scripts (but note that there's an error on that page: the index.html file should be in the top level of the assets folder as shown in their diagram, not the top level of the app folder as they state).

Try the tool.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

iPhone 4 deals in the UK

Moneysupermarket.com have published a helpful table (scroll to the end of the webpage) comparing UK iPhone 4 deals, in order of total cost over the contract period.

Tesco seem the cheapest.

Not that I'm necessarily rushing to get one myself.

I'm not normally an Apple person. Their admittedly very clever marketing and ingenious brand imaging haven't succeeded yet in winning me over as I'm don't care that much about fashion and I don't like Apple's over-controlling and locked down approach, which takes away users' own power and control - from the way iTunes was originally DRM'd to the hilt (despite the availability of some iTunes files now in non-DRM form), to Apple's insistence on vetting all third party developer iPhone and iPad apps to their own arbitrary moralistic and possibly monopolistic criteria (as witness what happened initially with Simon Maddox's excellent and consumer-championing 0870 app) and taking an unreasonably long time to do it in too, to their refusal to support Flash (e.g. for viewing YouTube videos), and effectively trying to stop cross-platform mobile development. I think the US were right to start anti-trust probes into Apple.

But, having tried a friend's (older model) iPhone, whose soft onscreen keyboard is much more accurate and faster to use than the Android G1's soft keyboard, and having seen the huge range of iPhone apps available for free or at very reasonable prices, I have to say I'm just a little bit tempted…

Saturday, 30 January 2010

Use Powerpoint not PDF, for greener printing of presentations

If you want to help other people save ink and paper (and therefore save money) when they're printing your presentation slides, please consider:

distributing or uploading your presentation slides as Powerpoint PPT files instead of Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and
pointing recipients of the slides to this blog post, if they don't already know about the far greater flexibility that they have with PPT files to set the layout and contrast as they wish (whereas with PDF they're stuck with what they're given).

Why do I say this? I'm not trying to to do the Microsoft fan thing, honest (although I do prefer Windows to Mac).
First, people can open Powerpoint PPT slides using the open source office suite OpenOffice, which is available free for Mac and Linux as well as Windows, even if they don't have Microsoft Office. So using PPT doesn't exclude anyone.
Powerpoint has 2 big advantages over PDF for attendees or students who need to print out presentation slides:

If the slides happen to have a dark background e.g. for aesthetic reasons, printing them as is just wastes a ton of ink; but it's possible (when the slides are in PPT format, but not when they're in PDF) to change the print settings so that they print out "Black and white", with the dark background miraculously transformed into a white background.

Powerpoint allows recipients to arrange the slides as they wish, in the size they wish (which is an accessibility issue too), when printing - i.e. they can print the file as slides, handouts (with whatever number of slides per page the user sets), notes or in outline form. It should be up to the attendee to decide how many slides per page and how much space for writing they want, and to be able to print out slides that suit their needs.

OpenOffice Impress - menu File > Print, it's the Content dropdown list to pick Slides, Handouts, Notes or Outline, then if it's Handouts select the Slides per page and their order on the page (left to right or up to down)
Powerpoint 2003 (Powerpoint 2007 is similar) - menu File > Print, it's the "Print what" dropdown, and again for Handouts select number of Slides per page and order.

In case you wonder, yes this post was triggered by my being presented on too many occasions with PDF slides that were set in stone.
Often I'm given PDF files with 3 slides a page and "space for notes" on the right (that's the - to me - dreaded "Handouts, 3 slides per page" setting), where text or diagrams on the slides are just too small for me to see properly because they've put in too many bullet points, whereas I'd much rather have bigger slides I can read without any "space for writing" on the right which I may well not use.
Conversely, at other times I've been stuck with 1 slide (maybe with just a couple of bullet points on it) per page in PDF format, when I'd rather save paper and print 3 or 4 slides per page.
And yes, I've also been given PDF slides with dark backgrounds too! (In that case I usually copy and paste all the text into a Word document and print that, to save printer ink. Unless they've turned off the ability to copy from the PDF, of course.)
With Powerpoint, I have a choice. With PDF, I don't.
So my plea to all speakers and presenters is this: please ditch PDF, let the user decide for themselves how many slides per page and how much writing space they need, and let users print without ink-wasting dark backgrounds, by providing them with slides in PPT format. And you'll boost your ecologically sound and environmentally friendly cred to boot!

Friday, 29 January 2010

Print slides without dark background in OpenOffice

Some speakers provide Powerpoint .PPT slides with a dark background, which wastes a lot of ink when you print them off. Or slides with yellow text on a white background, which are near impossible to read.

Previously I blogged about how to print Powerpoint slides without the dark background and similarly how to solve the too-light text issue, when you print them in Microsoft Powerpoint.

Here's another tip: you can do the same thing using the free open source office suite OpenOffice too - Impress being the component of OpenOffice that you use for preparing and viewing presentation slides. Impress can open Powerpoint .PPT slides. (Download OpenOffice.)

To print out PPT slides minus the dark background in Impress:

Open the slides
Menu File >Print
Click the Options button:
Under Quality, pick Black and White, then OK.

In case you worry, it shouldn't print out the dark background as black, the background will be converted to a white background, with the text in black. Much more easy to read, and more environmentally (and pocket) friendly.

Thursday, 10 December 2009

How to crop unwanted margins from PDF scans, free

This post shows how to get rid of black margins (or margins showing page edges etc) before printing out PDFs, thus saving money on printer ink and being more environmentally friendly.

Say you scan a few pages from a book to PDF and you want to print it out. Too much black ink is often wasted when printing PDFs produced by scanning pages from books or magazines where the page is smaller than the scanning area, because the space where the scanning area is bigger than the book or journal page shows up in the scan as dark margins, as in the pic below - and similarly when you're scanning photocopies of pages from books or journals. (All copying & scanning done within fair use or fair dealing limits, of course!)

But you can eliminate unnecessarily ink-wasting black margins from your PDFs simply by cropping the margins from the PDF, saving the cropped version, and then printing out the cropped file instead.

A very good free tool for cropping PDFs is PDFill PDF Tools (free for private use).

How to crop black margins from PDFs using PDF Tools

Preparation - open up the PDF file which you want to crop, e.g. in the usual Acrobat Reader. Usually the unwanted dark margins will be on 2 sides of the page. Here is an example (taken from The Future of the Internet by the brilliant Jonathan Zittrain as he's a very nice man who I'm pretty sure won't mind my using 1 page from his book to illustrate this):
Make a note of which sides those extra black margins are on, e.g. top and left, and estimate how much of the page they're taking up and therefore how much needs cropping. E.g. in the UK, with an A4 page size scan, in the above example it might be 0.5" left and 2 or 3" bottom, i.e. you want to remove 0.5" from the left margin and say 3" from the bottom margin. Maybe even about 1.5" from the right margin too, in this case.
If the PDF document is several pages long, as it often is, make sure you page through it quickly to figure out what measurements (e.g. 0.9"?) would deal with most of the bits you want to cut out, while leaving the substantive text untouched. It won't be perfect but at least you should be able to get most of it. If you don't check this there's a danger you might cut out too much.
Download PDFill PDFTools and install it if you haven't already.
Launch PDF Tools.
Click button 4, "Rotate or Crop PDF Pages":
In the file chooser that comes up, select the PDF file you want to crop.
Make sure you tick to select "All pages" on the right, otherwise it will only crop the first page. (That's why in 3. above I said skim through it to work out what measurements would be the best for all pages.)
Then, in the "Crop Box" section on the left, fill in how much should be cropped for each margin, i.e. how much you want to take off from the top margin, left side, right side or bottom margin. It defaults to inches (") as you can see. So for the example in 1. above I'd try - Left Margin 0.5", Right Margin 1.5", Bottom Margin 3" and leave Top Margin alone as 0".
Then click the Save As button and - this is important! - give the file a new name, not the same name as the original PDF document. E.g. you could call it say "scancropped1.pdf". And click Save.
Open your newly created PDF, e.g. scancropped1.pdf, in Acrobat Reader (or Foxit or other PDF reader of your choice) and you'll see the margins are gone. Page through it to make sure you've cropped the margins you didn't want but not lost any important page content. And just print it out from there. This is what my example looked like after I put in the measurements listed in step 9 above - not bad guessing on my part:
If during your skim through you notice it's cropped too much, or too little, no problem. Just start again from step 7 above, but this time try slightly different measurements for how much to chop off, then save the file as a new file (or even overwrite scancropped1.pdf if that was really unusable, but again don't overwrite the original file). Just keep trying till you get it the way you want - with experience it only takes me 1 or 2 goes, and then voila I can print the PDF scan without the dark margins. In the example I showed above, I could even start with the newly saved cropped PDF file, take a bit off the top margin say 0.5", and I'd be there.

And that's it. The PDF Tools suite has some other useful tools for working with or tweaking PDF files, including converting images to PDF and vice versa - just have a play and see (if you hover over a button more info is given, and the Help is good).

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Students: save money - tips

This post isn't on technology, but has some tips which I think may help people going (back) to "school", so I'm posting them here.

These tips apply to all students, but are particularly aimed at people going back to study full time as a mature student, who may not know about all these tips - you want a career change, you've lost your job and decide to retrain, whatever the reason, as a fulltime student there are some key things you can do to save money given that you'll be on a tight budget with fees to pay and living expenses etc (the main focus is on the UK especially London):

Look out for general student discounts like (currently) Microsoft's student discounts on Windows and Office products (e.g. Windows 7 at £30 for UK students with valid ac.uk email addresses - but it's only until 11:59pm GMT on January 3rd, 2010 so grab a copy ASAP if you need it - see eligibility conditions). And similarly US students can get Windows 7 cheaply too.
Apply for a council tax discount or exemption - if you live alone or only with other full time students, you could be exempt altogether; but if you live with others e.g. non-student flatmates or partner, you can still get a discount - check out your council's website for details and (often) a downloadable form. Find your local authority.
(London) Apply for an 18+ student Oystercard. This gets you a very helpful 30% discount off a 7-day or longer travelcard for travel on the Tube, buses etc.

Extra tip: the card generally lasts until mid October of the next year. Apply ASAP because the discount starts as soon as you get the card. Some colleges are helpful and will validate you with London Underground online from the beginning of September even before you've arrived at college in person; some make you go through lots of painful red tape before they add you to their system, even as late as October.
If you get the card at the beginning of September, consider buying a travelcard for 2 weeks, then an annual one in mid-October to last you the rest of your year of eligibility. Prices usually go up around the beginning of the calendar year, so buying 1 year then 2 weeks the following year will be more expensive than 2 weeks + 1 year. Not much more, but everything counts.

Get an NUS Extra card. You have to order it online, then collect it in person from your local student union (they'll email you when it's ready, takes a couple of weeks on average). It costs £10 but entitles you to discounts at participating retailers.

A key one is Amazon, for (at the date of writing) a 5% discounts on books and certain other products up to a pretty decent cumulative total spend (but not on electronics unfortunately, though Apple, Philips, Comet offer a discount on those, and there's e.g. a 3 Mobile Broadband student offer).
A discount on Staples or Ryman stationery supplies may come in handy too. And Superdrug, Body Shop, Pizza Hut, Moss Bros, Warehouse, Topshop, Miss Selfridge, JJB Sport, Joe Browns, Firetrap, cinema tickets at Odeon, Ticketmaster gig tickets etc - see the NUS Extra page for details of all discounts.

(Added) Check with your college whether there are any special offers, e.g. many offer their students free or cheap anti-virus software to install on their own computers; cheap computer consumables; etc. You may have to hunt round your college website's student pages as they're not always obvious.

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Saving money online - shopping deals etc

I notice that ClickCashBack.co.uk, which offers members cashback for online shopping have got rid of their annual admin fee and will be trying to make money just from ads.

They offer deals from retailers and manufacturers you've heard of (like 2.5% cashback from the Apple Store when I looked, and discounts for Dabs, Dell, HP etc products), which is good! I haven't tried buying anything via them yet, but I plan to.

Separately but in a similar vein, I hear that Yahoo have recently launched Yahoo! Deals for the USA (still seems to be Kelkoo in the UK), which they called:

"the first website to provide daily deals, online coupons, grocery coupons, local coupons, store circulars and exclusive deals all in one place"

Also:

In a recent Yahoo! survey, 43 percent of participants said they are using coupons more since last year. They also cited that easier access to coupons would motivate them to use coupons more often, a sentiment stated by 76 percent of women. That said, the majority of people polled feel that there are not currently enough coupons for things they want to buy and nearly half actually think coupon hunting is a chore. Less than a fifth of consumers have a "go-to" online site and almost 80 percent think the process of finding coupons is difficult.

Yahoo! Deals even have a Twitter feed for realtime offers / deals.

Both interesting signs of the times, but it can all be only good news for us consumers.

Sunday, 24 May 2009

Mobile price comparison services: BillMonitor, MobileMeg

A short post to mention BillMonitor which was the first mobile price comparison service to be accredited by UK comms regulator Ofcom earlier this week. It compares vodafone, orange, T-Mobile, O2 and 3.

I hope more price comparison calculators / tables get approved, which can only be good news for consumers.

Ofcom's approval process involves as they say a "rigorous independent audit", so you should be able to trust accredited services to help you choose or switch to price plans / tariffs that save you money - particularly important in these credit crunch times!

You may also be interested in Ofcom's FAQ for consumers on accreditation of price comparison services generally. The vast majority of cost comparison services etc aren't accredited.

Separately, while not Ofcom-accredited, another service called MobileMeg is back.

This focuses specifically on just comparing mobile data price plans (i.e. charges and costs when you're using the internet on your mobile phone, including WAP, mobile internet, mobile email, chat etc).

Thursday, 2 April 2009

Save money calling 0870, 0845, 0800 on iPhone / G1 : review

(From Simon’s iPhone screenshots on Flickr, with his permission)

Summary

If you use an iPhone or G1 mobile phone in the UK, here’s how to potentially save lots of money when calling non-geographic 0870, 0845 or 0800 numbers from your cellphone (for which the mobile network operators normally charge you extra, on top of your usual tariff / inclusive minutes).

Just get yourself Simon Maddox’s free 0870 app. Simon has saved UK consumers who used his software over £20,000 in total between November 2008 and March 2009 – the man deserves a consumers’ award! See all of Simon’s iPhone 0870 screenshots.

The app saves you money by automatically getting you the alternative geographic telephone number (if available), which should be included within your contract minutes.

One thing to watch: if there’s no geographic number available, at the moment it’ll ring the 08 number anyway, trying to get the cheapest option. But you can stop it from completing the call before they pick up, in that case - just end the call when you see that it's still calling an 08 number.

How to get the 0870 app

G1 Android – go to the Android Market via the icon on your phone; scroll down the screen and select Search, and search for “0870”. Install it and open / enable it once installed by opening the app up then tapping on it. (Tap again to disable it.)
iPhone - Apple won’t allow it to be downloaded from their App Store, shame on them, see below (and this funny cartoon “flowchart” seems to sum up their attitude very well!). Contact Simon if you’d like a copy.

Details

Calling 0800 “freefone” phone numbers or so-called 0845 “local rate”, 0870 “national rate” and many other non-geographic numbers isn’t free, or is charged at more than “local” rates, if you call the number using your mobile phone. Even when they’re not meant to be “premium rate” numbers.

Those sorts of numbers were originally offered in order to encourage calls by customers. But in practice it doesn’t work that way – those numbers are instead used as cash cows by mobile network operators who charge you extra for calling those numbers from your mobile – and the calls aren’t even counted as part of your monthly inclusive contract minutes.

In fact, the company or organisation you call gets a cut of what you pay for the privilege of calling them (and often being put on hold for 20 minutes at a cost to you of X p a second) – and so does the mobile phone network provider.

This “revenue sharing” is a very nice little earner for them both, especially when UK comms regulator Ofcom has been pretty toothless about it all - issuing consultation after consultation on the subject without doing anything except continually postponing, isn’t a substitute for real action to protect consumers, and I’ve blogged about Ofcom's 0870 inaction before. Oddly enough, consumers and consumer bodies don’t seem to have been making enough of a fuss about this consumer rip-off either.

Side note: 03 numbers do get treated in exactly the same way as national rate geographic numbers e.g. being included as part of your inclusive minutes instead of being charged extra, so use those if you can. As Ofcom put it “Organisations using 03 numbers will offer consumers a single national point of contact without involving additional charges for the service, over and above the cost of calls to geographic numbers.”

SayNoTo0870 website

To the rescue had come SayNoTo0870 (but again it’s no substitute for proper regulation, shame on Ofcom & the government).

This excellent site lets you look up an 0800, 0845 or 0870 etc number and find the geographic equivalent where possible, which you can then call from your mobile - and have the call time count as part of your inclusive minutes.

You can also be public-spirited and add geographic numbers that you come across which are alternatives for 0870 etc numbers. Often, the numbers that companies advertise as being for use by overseas callers will work for this purpose. Though some businesses have taken to refusing to deal with calls to that number if you can’t confirm that you’re dialling from overseas, boo to them.

Now if you have any cellphone that has a web browser, you can look up a number on SayNoTo0870 online, before you try to call it. But that can be a bit laborious.

Simon Maddox’s 0870 software – and boo to Apple

To the rescue has come someone else: talented mobile developer Simon Maddox.

If you have an iPhone or G1 phone you can get his 0870 application, which he’s generously made available for free, and which (between Nov 2008 and 20 March 2009) saved UK consumers over £20,000 in 08 calls from their mobiles. Which has risen to over £25,500 as at 1 April 2009, and that’s no joke!

I don’t have an iPhone so I can only review the software from a G1 viewpoint. But it’s straightforward – just install and open the app, and enable it by touching the screen (it'll flash up a message saying that it's been enabled - or disabled, if that's the case).

From then on, when you try to call an 0870, 0845 or 0800 on your G1, Simon’s app will intervene and divert the phone to a geographical number or, if none can be found, the cheapest option, based on the data from the SayNoTo0870 site.

It’s so useful for consumers that a T-Mobile employee emailed Simon to ask if they could use it in their stores to help sell the G1!

And yet Apple wouldn’t allow Simon’s app to be downloaded from their App Store, shortsightedly – and in my view wrongly - claiming that it was an attempt to “circumvent carrier features and policies”.

Anyone who can use the iPhone web browser can search for an 0870, 0800 or 0845 number on the original SayNoTo0870 website. Simon’s app just makes it a bit quicker and easier to find and call the equivalent geographic number, and it’s perfectly legal for users to do so, it’s not like he’s whispering “Pssst! Under the table! An illegal geographic number for you, mate!”.

Where’s the circumvention in that? What are Apple going to do next, block iPhone users from going to the SayNoTo0870 website altogether? Apple’s unwarranted refusal here deserves greater publicity, and I hope this blog post will help spread the word.

Only one very small issue from me – I know there’s a line through the 0870 but if Simon changed its name maybe more people would realise what it does and download it? Like calling it “Save money on 0870 calls” instead?

Disclosure: Simon’s a pal of mine. But I ain’t biassed, and you don’t have to take my word for it – the app is free, go try it for yourself!

Thursday, 5 March 2009

How to save money on online orders: diginomics

£££ €€€ $$$ !!!

“Just say no!”

Less cryptically, there’s a simple tip embodied in that statement which may help you save money when you order over the internet. And certainly in these *credit crunch times of economic recession, so many things are so expensive that every penny or cent (or euro!) can make a difference.

It’s a truism that sellers want to charge you the maximum they can - so they’ll try to make you pay the most that you’re willing to pay. It’s simple market economics, supply and demand.

Which, taken to extremes, means that suppliers will charge different customers a different price for the exact same product (or charge the same customer a different price at different times) - if they can figure out that the customer is willing to pay more for it.

And, with the power of the Web / internet, they can figure that out, because online they can compute things very quickly, live, in real time.

This differential pricing is just an application of diginomics, indeed a very sensible application as far as the vendor is concerned, because it helps them make the most money that they can - and, after all, it’s their profits, their bottom line, that they really care the most about.

So, what can we poor consumers do? Why, figure them out, and use their tactics to our own advantage, of course!

Below is a suggested counter-strategy for consumers when shopping over the Net.

Now note that this doesn’t work with all (or indeed many) websites, but only with the ones who apply differential pricing to different customers or at different stages of the shopping / ordering process, it really can make a difference. An example of a site which does this is business cards site VistaPrint.

Also, note that a site could apply different types of discounts at different times, as they change their pricing strategies, so you'll need to keep trying at different times.

With those points in mind, here are the suggested steps:

First, check the original prices. In the shoppingcart, at the start add everything you’re planning to buy, in the quantities you ultimately want.
At the end, just before you have to enter your credit card details or confirm anything that makes your order irreversible (e.g. if you have stored credit card details on that site – not a good idea for security reasons even if it’s convenient), just tot it all up, including shipping / delivery charges. Make sure you’ve got a note of the price per item of each kind.
But then don’t buy anything – instead of completing the order make sure you cancel everything, empty your basket etc. (And don’t blame me if you don’t, you have to watch it all very carefully)!
Now, go back and start again. This time, make sure that, even if you want to buy several of the same item, or some other kind of multiple order (e.g. renew a domain name for 2 years instead of 1), you start out with an empty cart and then add the very minimum you can. In other words, reduce the quantity to 1 item (or 1 year, etc) even if they defaulted you to 2 or you really wanted to buy 5, and so on. And add just 1 product in the shoppingbasket to begin with.
Then carry on with the ordering process, and check if at subsequent stages they come up with offers of discounts for multiple items – or discount on any other items – or free or cheaper postage costs. That kind of thing.
But, just keep saying “No” to the various offers, and see whether the special offers get better and better at later stages (obviously, make sure you keep track of the price per unit of the same type of goods at each stage so that you can compare them; and if an offer goes away as you proceed, make a note of the last stage when the offer is available).
And again, at the end, just before you commit yourself to the order, cancel everything and empty your cart.
You may need to repeat the process but just add different quantities or different products a different stages just to see if it makes a difference to the ultimate unit price per item (or rather the whole basket of goods that you really want, in the quantities of each kind of goods that you want, including shipping costs). Just experiment, use trial & error etc, but again make sure you don't commit yourself to a purchase yet.
Now, after all your tests, you can start shopping again - but this time you know exactly what offers will be made at what stage, and you can now increase the quantities in your shoppingcart at the right time, and also maybe add different “related” products to your basket if they’re offered at a better price – i.e. where, if you ordered that amount or those products at the very first stage when you added things to your basket, the item would be at a higher price. And you can finalise your order. (Do make your definitive purchase soon after your testing, because as mentioned the shopping sites do change their offers and pricing techniques from time to time, so what worked best one day to give you the best prices on one particular aggregate shopping basket may not work another day.)

And that’s it.

If you found that this tip worked for you, please leave a comment saying so, and list the names / Web addresses of theonline shopping sites it worked for!