A great benefit the Internet offers you as a smart shopper is the ability to find bunches of discounts online! Lots and lots of lovely rebates, grocery coupons, money back, dollars off, printable coupons for brick-and-mortar stores and the like.

Let's learn more by starting with:

Before You Begin - Some Basic Premises

Merchants like you spending your money. Generally, the more you spend, the better! But sometimes they first have to get you into their store (or website). This is where the coupons/freebies/rebates kick into gear.

Let's take your typical grocery store like Shop Rite. Visit that site now - you'll see a link for 'weekly specials' (it's the circular you can pick up at any store). Voila, there's savings right there! Just about any grocery store will have that available.

But now let's take it a weeee bit further. Let's say that you have a hankering to buy a printer from Staples. You could go to Google and search for

staples coupon

and see that bunches of sites offer coupons from that store.

That's very lovely.

Think now for a sec, however. One way of getting a good price is to take advantage of rebates, right? Search instead for

staples rebate

That store has an online presence at Staples Easy Rebates! And if you visit that site, you'll see the link Find rebate offers now - you can search for anything like printers or computers or what have you. Dozens of rebates were returned.

This shows you one very key fact. You can find discounts/rebates online by:

• Searching - go to your favorite search engine and search for item coupon or item discount or item rebate

• Visit the site itself - visit the merchant's website itself and use their search functionality to find "discounts" or "deals" or "coupons" or "rebates.

Want to learn more? It's now time to dive into:

Step 1 - Research!

Did you know that coupons are often shared via online forums?

It's true! Let's say that you have a deeply ingrained desire to buy crafts at Michael's.. Let's pretend that you weren't aware you could simply visit that site and look for their weekly deals! Go instead to Google and search on

michaels coupon

You might find:

Michaels 40% off

Wait a sec, that was a person offering a coupon! Look at the site again - it's a whole forum dedicated towards coupons! Quite an excellent resource.

But it's still not an online printable coupon. Go back to the original search - you might find:

Michael's Coupons

There's some coupon information that reads, Michaels store coupons are not available online or via email. They are distributed through your local newspaper or ad distribution service only.....

Ah, that explains it.

What if you weren't dead-set on a brand...can you find even better deals online? Of course you can! And that leads me to:

Step 2 - Free Coupons

Take a deep breath and click on the following search:

free coupons

Just look at all those places that are offering these great bargains! Sites like:

• Deal Catcher

• Hot Coupons

• Refund Sweepers

all offer you super bargains you can take advantage of.

Here's another useful tip. Many online shopping sites will offer discounts via a "code." Search now on Google for

coupon code

Some results might be:

• Current Codes

• eCoupons

The above sites returned will all offer you coupon codes you can use when purchasing from particular merchants.

And don't forget online auctions - you can find great big bunches of already-clipped coupons at eBay like the following:

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There are lots of great bargains online, once you simply know how to go about finding them.

Step 3 - For More Information

As always, it's the educated consumer who is the best (and in this case, safest!) customer. Enjoy the following useful resources.

• Coupon Forum - excellent forum for coupon discussions

• Moms View - bunches of coupons of all kinds

• Confessions of a Coupon Clipping Queen - handy coupon-clipping tips

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