Recoup Your Holidays Shopping Expenses with Price Protection

Just like Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” If you bought your holiday gifts less than 30 days ago, you may have some uncollected money waiting for you! Since I don’t know where you bought your gifts, I will share my own experience with gifts bought from Amazon.com.

Time and Money

Remixed photo, sources via Flickr and morgueFile

PriceProtectr and Price Protection

A couple of weeks ago, I learned about a web site called PriceProtectr from my friend at Gather Little By Little. So I gave it a try, and registered purchases from my most recent order with Amazon into their system. Less than a week later, I got an email saying that Amazon had reduced the price on an item, with a detailed instruction on how to get my money back. Here is part of the email:

“Please verify the item and price, and review the retailer’s price protection policy before requesting a refund.
To claim your refund: Visit their contact page, click the ‘e-mail’ tab, and choose ‘Refund Inquiry’ from the dropdown list. Or contact their customer service department at 1-800-201-7575. Hitting 7 should get you to a customer service rep right away.”

Amazon.com and the 30-day Post-Order Price Guarantee

The process was simple. I followed the instruction and sent Amazon.com a request for refund via their contact form. In less than a day, I got my email confirmation and the $1.28 refund back from them. Encouraged, I went into my order history report and found more items that had their prices reduced. I followed the same process, and overall, I got a total of about $10 back from Amazon.

If you did your shopping less than 30 days ago, it may be worthwhile to go back to the web sites and stores to review their price protection policy and see if you can get money back for some of the items you purchased.

Good luck with refund hunting!

More on price protection:

Protect Against After-Purchase Price Drops with PriceProtectr @ Zen Personal Finance
Track Price Drops with Price Protectr @ Get Rich Slowly
It’s YOUR money, be CHEAP! @ Canadian Financial Stuff
Price Protectr @ Blunt Money

This post was featured in:

The Festival of Frugality #107 – The Little Things Edition hosted by Cash Money Life. For more information please visit the Festival of Frugality.

7 Comments

SavingDiva
January 7, 2008, 14:36

I’ve never done this, but I think it would be nice…I never really follow up on purchases…I buy them and forget about it.
Pinyo
January 7, 2008, 17:55

@SavingDiva – Me neither. So it was a nice surprise to get $10 back. I wish I’d done this ages ago. I’d probably saved hundreds by now.
Emily Starbuck Gerson
January 8, 2008, 15:55

That is amazing – how had I never heard about that before?? Thanks for sharing!
Harris
January 9, 2008, 13:16

Good advice, I always check prices on Amazon a few days after ordering to see if I can get any money back. I bought a projector through Amazon and was able to get $50 back 2 weeks later.
I also noticed that you switched to a middle content column. Any reason for this?
Pinyo
January 9, 2008, 13:26

@Emily – I didn’t really get into this until recently either. I wish I had done it sooner.
@Harris – Thank you. That’s a lot of money. Good for you.
Regarding the layout, I just want to try different things to see if it helps usability and subscriber counts.
Make Friends, Earn Money
January 10, 2008, 6:44

This is a new one to me, but what a great service, will have to give this a go and see what happens. I’ve made a number of purchases recently
Pinyo
January 10, 2008, 7:00

@Make Friends – definitely give it a try!