Amazon.com is a huge marketplace, possibly the Internet’s biggest, so it might be hard to navigate your way through their website with the deals, discounts and coupons scattered all over the place.

However, over the years, Amazon has launched many features that will save customer’s big money. In this article, I will introduce the most useful of them.

1. Amazon Prime

Probably the most common service of Amazon, Prime, lets you enjoy free 2-day shipping. This service costs $10.99 a month or $99 a year. But for those who order a lot of stuff from Amazon, Prime will be a money and time saver. They also offer a 30-day free trial if you’re unsure about the service at first.

There are also a few other benefits to Amazon Prime. For example, the membership lets you to stream movies, listen to music and read Kindle books without paying extra. Talking about Kindle books, you also get to read some titles before they are officially released to the public.

Furthermore, if you are a friend of groceries, Prime Pantry allows you to fill a 45 lbs box with grocery items and the box will be shipped for a flat $5.99 fee. Lastly, Prime members get to enjoy unlimited cloud based storage for their photos.

I usually call Prime the most useful service of Amazon because for ten bucks a month you’re getting a lot. Not only the free shipping, but all the other benefits mentioned above are available to you. If you shop a lot at Amazon, or are looking for entertainment and cloud storage, Amazon Prime membership will be probably worth it!

2. Free Shipping on Many Orders

If you don’t want Prime with free and fast shipping on all orders, you’re not out of luck. As Amazon states on their website, “all orders of $35 or more of eligible items across any product category qualify for FREE Shipping.” So in another words, buy products for at least 35 dollars and you won’t be paying anything for shipping.

The downside of this free shipping without Prime is the time it takes. The items will reach your address in 5-8 business days (remember, with Prime the shipping is only two days). If you can wait that long and don’t buy that frequently from Amazon, enjoying the Primeless free shipping should be worth it. In the same vein, if you buy products from Amazon very often, Amazon Prime service will pay itself back after some time.

See Also: Are You Falling For Supermarket Spending Tricks?

3. Subscribe & Save

Usually used for household products, with the Subscribe & Save feature you get new items (like dog food or toilet paper) shipped to you on a regular basis every month. There is a discount of 5-15% off these items when you use the subscription. You can cancel the subscription at any time so there are no long-term contracts.

Because of price changes over days and months, the time of placing the order (and of course the items you select) play a big role whether Subscribe & Save actually saves you money. Indeed, such a thing is hard to tell beforehand, but you can always give a try to Subscribe and Save. If it doesn’t work, ditch it.

4. Use Amazon Gold Box Deals

Amazon has so many deals going on, but probably the most famous is the Gold Box. Every day, new deals and discounts will be posted on that page. They have several types of deals on the website, such as Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and Coupons. Many of the deals won’t be available for long, so checking Gold Box often might be a good idea. However, if you don’t want to bother checking the site daily you can also subscribe to their email newsletter. The latest deals will then be delivered to your email inbox.

Bear in mind that while useful, Gold Box Deals still don’t show the biggest discounts Amazon has. The deals there are probably hand picked by Amazon to show various products that are selling for lower price momentarily. You might find gems there, but indeed it’s not the place to find all the largest discounts percentage-wise. The next section covers this problem – how to find the really lucrative, “hidden” bargains from this huge marketplace.

5. Use A Third Party Website

There are many websites created around Amazon.com. These websites offer, for example, advanced search, top deals, discounts, suggestions, gift ideas, price tracking and more.

The main advantage you’ll notice are the sorting options: these deal finders often have an inner algorithm to find best discounts and show them in a way to the user that is not possible on Amazon.com. In essence, you could very well find better deals with these websites than you could on Amazon.com itself!

Another feature worthy of mentioning is price tracking. You can sign up for a price drop notification, after which the service starts pinging Amazon for the product, often several times a day. When the service gets a response that the price has dropped below the threshold you set, you get an email notification from the service. This way, you don’t need to check Amazon yourself every day – you can let the machine do that for you. The most popular of these is camelcamelcamel.com

These third party websites are free to use, and they operate on a commission basis. When you buy a product they recommend or list on their website, they get a small commission from your purchase. The price, naturally, stays the same to you. If you don’t know where to start looking for these websites for easier Amazon shopping, you can check Google for ideas.

Now you know a few methods how you can possibly save money on Amazon. The most essential way is probably Amazon Prime, as it effectively removes the shipping fee which might hold you back – especially when buying low value items. Nonetheless, all of the tips listed above are worth your while if you are a serious penny pincher.

Hopefully with these tips you can save a few bucks soon, and dozens of dollars in the long run when shopping at Amazon.com!