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Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!

I normally wouldn’t write an entire post about the shipping options of a single retailer. But Amazon represents over 12% of all of our household spending. And we order from Amazon almost daily, so even small opportunities to save money translate to big household savings for us.[1]

One of my favorite small Amazon tips is to maximize the amount of “No-Rush” digital credits we get. We use these credits quickly on TV shows and movies (generally for our kids), so they are almost as good as cash savings. Typically these credits are $1 or $2, but I’ve noticed the credits have skyrocketed this holiday season. Take a look at this:

A $4 credit on a $9 order! Given how often we order from Amazon, I’ve spent a while experimenting with these credits, and here’s what I’ve found:

• Typically, Amazon will not offer a reward on a single, lower-value item. So, if I have multiple items to order, I will start with one item, and then progressively add more items to my cart and go to check out after each item, placing an order the first time they offer a reward. This means that you may maximize your credits by placing five orders, each with two items, rather than a single order of 10 items.

• This is often even true of extremely low value items. My best credit offer was on two different items which each cost about $5 and had to be shipped separately. Amazon offered a $4 credit on each one.

• Amazon generally offers better deals during heavy holiday shopping periods. I noticed the credits started increasing around Black Friday (to $2-3) and just reached $4 this past week. So if you have several non time-sensitive items to order, it’s probably worth waiting for a crunch period like this.

If you’re a heavy Amazon user (like us), you’d probably also benefit from some of my other Amazon shopping optimization tips, which I’ve collected in Saving Money on Amazon.

And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:

Very few things online amaze me anymore, but Palette.fm is truly incredible. Using machine learning, it will attempt to colorize any old black and white photo you upload (with no account required). I tried it on some old family photos, and the results were incredible. Of course, the colors are just Palette’s best guess, but the way it brought 60+ year old photos to life was truly special. And free!

Also:

I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.

[1] Note, this tip assumes that you are an Amazon Prime member, like an estimated 166 million Americans.

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