On Friday, more than 2,000 retailers will be participating in one of the greatest made-up holidays of modern times: Free Shipping Day. Household names like Sephora, Barnes Noble, Toys “R” Us, ShopBop, Harry David and Nordstrom are dropping their shipping fees for 24 hours.
You can browse the complete list of participating retailers at FreeShippingDay.com and possibly save enough to buy a cup of Starbucks Christmas blend.
If you want to slip a restaurant gift certificate into someone’s stocking or (not that we’re hinting or anything) take a colleague out for a holiday lunch, browse Coupons.com. Amid the discounts for Cheerios and Mountain Dew you will find discounted gift certificates to local restaurants like Boom, the Italian joint on Spring Street in Manhattan, and HK in Hell’s Kitchen, where $25 gift certificates sold for $10 last week.
Another easy 11th-hour gift: magazine subscriptions. You can save by buying them through DiscountMagazines.com, where some yearly subscriptions, a few including iPad versions, are available for $5.95 (The Atlantic Monthly, Fast Company, Outside Magazine, Parents Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens).
Some of the best deals can be had by joining your favorite retailer’s e-mail list and letting the deals come to your in-box. To streamline the sign-up process, you can register for e-mail alerts for multiple retailers at once on sites like Rather-Be-Shopping.com. When a coupon is added that meets your criteria, you’ll get a message. The site also posts coupon codes. This week there were savings for Levi’s, Philosophy and Gaiam.
For gift ideas as well as discounts, catch-all sites — FatWallet.com, CouponMountain.com, CouponWinner.com, CouponCraze.com, Retailmenot.com and CouponAlbum.com — will give you an overview of the cluttered discounting landscape and enable you to hunt for deals by store category or most popular promotion. CouponCabin.com had discounts this week for Godiva, Reebok, REI, TheKnot.com and the Discovery Channel store. Last week, PromotionalCodes.com noted sitewide sales at Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Steve Madden. And Savings.com had discounts for popular gift destinations like Brookstone, Wine.com and 1-800flowers.
And remember: just because Black Friday, another made-up shopping holiday, has come and gone does not mean that sites known for tracking Black Friday bargains, like Bfads.net, have stopped posting seasonal deals. The tagline on the reliable and well-researched deals site DealNews.com says it all: “Where every day is Black Friday.”
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4176cccba3442e56a9bce8b8e3b42b53