With the economy in its current condition, more consumers are turning to the Internet and away from brick and mortar stores because of the online savings. This is for many reasons; saving gas and time, more options to price compare, utilizing web only specials, etc.

Before the holidays I was shopping online and discovered something that helped me save even more money during my online shopping experiences. I am sure this is nothing new, but since I hadn’t noticed it before, I thought I would share it with friends, family and readers of my blog.

When shopping online, sign up for an account with the site and log in. If you don't want them having your normal e–mail address, create a gmail account. Once logged in, do your browsing and shopping. Fill up the shopping cart with items you want and then just leave the site. Yes, leave the site without buying anything. Within 24–48 hours you should receive an e–mail from the company asking where you went. In this e–mail they almost always offer a discount (up to 20% from our tests) on your entire purchase. In addition, shipping is sometimes included to make the savings even more.

The one caveat I will leave you with is that this doesn’t work in every case. But I tested it on over a dozen e–commerce websites and it does have about a 70% success rate. Even while writing this I received an e–mail alert from a popular nutrition store: Forget something in your cart? We’ll take 15% off your order! I went to checkout and the 15% off coupled with their current New Year’s promotions saved me 42%!

I'm not including the names of the various websites because I don't want this to go away but I do want to pass along a little savings and New Year's Cheer.

Try it, and let me know how it works out. I look forward to hearing your experiences.