Tools to Help You Save Online This Holiday Season

— -- You thought you knew all the ways to save online, but these tools offer smart and easy ways to keep dollars in your pocket this holiday season.

Honey

Honey is a browser add-on that automatically applies coupon codes during the checkout process. It does the work of seeing which codes are still active and which will net you the greatest discounts.

Once installed in your browser, it puts an icon in the toolbar. You click that icon while you are on the final stage of checking out and it rolls through all the codes it has on file. Recently while shopping for an NFL jersey for my son, I used Honey to save 20 percent.

Another feature of the service is especially handy for frequent Amazon users. Because Amazon has so many third-party vendors within the Amazon ecosystem, there are times when the “fulfilled by Amazon” price is not the lowest. I forget to look for lower prices within Amazon, thinking of it as a monolithic entity instead of a marketplace of multiple sellers. Honey does this work for you. While shopping for a hardcover book for my mother on the site, Honey alerted me to a cheaper Amazon vendor. Even more impressive, this was all done automatically; I hadn't even clicked on the browser icon, it overlaid the notification on the Amazon page and I saved $7.

Paribus

Paribus is a service that tracks the products you've already purchased for any price reduction after the fact.

You give the service permission to comb through your inbox looking for receipts. Paribus automatically tracks the price of products from those receipts and if there is a decrease, it notifies you and the retailer.

Paribus will automatically file a request for reimbursement and have the difference (minus its fee) credited to the card you used to make the purchase.

There are a few things to be aware of: Paribus doesn’t work with all commerce sites, but it does track prices on most of the big retail sites. Also, you have to give it permission to access your email to find receipts, but it is not a new company and it has a track record of handling privacy appropriately. Finally, it takes 25 percent of any refunds it facilitates, but considering that you don’t have to do any of the heavy-lifting, that 25 percent seems well spent.