Headline Feeds
Free Shipping Coupons, a shopping app by FreeShipping.org, is available for free at the App Store.
Two things that online shopping has going for it: You can probably find just about anything for sale online, and you don't even have to get dressed to buy it. Working against it are having to wait for it to get shipped to you, and the fact that shipping sometimes adds a few bucks to the price you pay.
FreeShipping.org makes no claims on changing the laws of space and time, but it can help you find good deals on shipping, as well as good discounts on the actual purchase prices of various items. The Web site now has an application that allows users to find deals and place orders through the iPhone.
Searching by E-tailer
Free Shipping Coupons' first function, it's Store List, displays what appears to be several hundred e-tailers, from 1 800 Pet Meds to Zunker Games. Click on a name, and it shows you what deals -- free shipping or otherwise -- that vendor is offering.
Pulling up the deals being offered on Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), for instance, got me a list of three possible ways to score free or reduced-cost shipping: Free Super Saver Shipping on Orders Over $25, Try Amazon Prime Free for 1 Month, and Free Shipping on Amazon Gift Cards.
Clicking on any of those offers takes you to a new screen that gives you more details, as well as the option to Use Coupon. In the Super Saver case from above, the Use Coupon button takes you to the Amazon Web page that spells out the conditions of Super Saver shipping. It doesn't seem to be so much a coupon as it is a notification of a possible deal -- information that you could find out if you just started shopping at Amazon, app or no app.
In the case of that Amazon Prime offer, well, that is a nice trick, and it's one that I've personally used before. If your order involves a huge shipping fee, you grab a one-month membership to Amazon Prime, place the order, get your free two-day shipping, and cancel your membership. Wrong and immoral? No way -- Amazon knows tons of people doing this will forget to cancel, so it comes out on top. Amazon itself makes the terms of the trial clear on its site; however, the Details section of the FreeShipping app that covers this option doesn't mention that you'll get spanked with a charge you probably don't want if you forget to cancel. Just remember, always read the fine print.
Other Kinds of Deals
Scanning further down Free Shipping Coupons' list of supported e-tailers, I spotted Dell's (Nasdaq: DELL) Web site. Again, I found that the Free Shipping Coupon offers were mostly existing deals that one would have found out about anyway by dealing with Dell directly.
However, there was also a section for Other Coupons on Dell's entry, which included some decent price cuts on select items -- TVs, laptops, etc. Some of these deals looked like they amounted to nearly half of an item's price -- hundreds of bucks. Unfortunately, it looks like you've got to act quickly with these. The better deals have promotional code numbers that expire once enough people have used them. Still, if you're in the right place at the right time, and it happens to be a deal on something you're already in the market for, lucky you.
Look Closer
I suspected the Categories function might be a little more helpful. If I know I want to buy an iPod, for instance, this might help me whittle down sites that would ship it to me for free. I clicked on Electronics and was given dozens of e-tailers from which to choose. However, I had to poke through them one by one until I found the exact deal I was looking for (thanks, Best Buy).
Let's try something a little more commoditized -- printer paper. It's cheap, but it's heavy, so shipping costs should weigh heavily for anyone looking to buy a good amount of it. Looking under Office Supplies, I again found dozens of vendors, and it took some poking to get a handle on what I could get. One outfit, Capital Supply said it would give me free shipping on orders of $50 or more, but I had no idea whether it sold paper. More investigation required. Further down, Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) promised free shipping on most orders over $50. Is paper included in that? I'll have to look into it by trying to place an order through its site.
So what's left of the FreeShipping app? The Featured function, which lists the latest and most outstanding shipping deals of select e-tailers around the Web. The appeal of this section was lost on me. If I do know what I want to buy, I'll use the Categories function to search out a good deal. If I don't know what I want to buy ... well, if I don't want to buy anything in particular, why would the fact that Acme E-tail is offering free shipping on shoes, handbags and hand grenades change my mind?
More Elbow Room
All this poking around really left me wishing for a way to search by product, not e-tailer. I really don't care which e-tailer I'm buying from, as long as it's legit, it's got what I'm looking for, and it's got the best price/shipping deal. What I'd like is a product search bar -- let me type in a product name to find out all the e-tailers who will, at this moment, ship it to me for free.
It would be great to also see the ones offering a big discount on the purchase price, if any. That might be wishful thinking, though. I'm no database expert, but I'm pretty sure building and maintaining that level of e-commerce omniscience would involve constant cataloging and re-cataloging of all pages of all dealer sites. Not a job I'd want.
Perhaps a product search bar isn't even enough to make this process comfortable. Maybe what really started getting to me was the fact that all this deal-hunting was being done on a small screen. The FreeShipping app itself looks fine on the iPhone's screen, but the moment it took me to a vendor ordering page -- usually not optimized for the small screen -- my eyes glazed over.
I'll read a news article on a small screen, I'll play a game on a small screen, but when it comes to really scouring through a page and trying to root out a bit of information like a price, or input my shipping info into a bank of data fields, I'll very likely give up in frustration and wait until I get to a real computer to deal with it.
Bottom line
What Free Shipping Coupons can give you is a broad list of e-tailers and the sort of shipping deals they offer. It won't give you much in the way of exclusive discounts, but if you want to compare vendors -- not specific products, but rather the e-tailers selling them -- on the basis of their overall transit cost offerings, this is a resource.
However, I'm hesitant to use an iPhone app to do this. The small screen lends itself better to certain activities -- more passive things like reading or short video -- than others. E-shopping on an iPhone -- and probably any other handheld -- is often a tedious task, and I'm usually left with the feeling that if I'd used a more robust desktop browser, I'd probably have the patience to look harder and scoop up a better deal.
