MyMoneyBlog had a post recently on getting some cheap financial magazines. His source, MagazinePriceSearch.com, is pretty good, and sometimes rivals the deals you can get on eBay.
Well, it's possible sometimes to do even better!
MagazinePriceSearch does very well by keeping up to date on the best deals and coupons on about two dozen different magazine subscription sites. It even tells you which of the stores has the best deal on a particular magazine, as it ranks the merchants by price.
Which works to your advantage, if you want to save even more money!
So let's say that you've already checked eBay for the best price, and want to see if you can do better. You can check MagazinePriceSearch.com for a great price there.
Now, check out Ebates! This is a click-through rebate site, meaning that if you sign up for an account, log in, and click through to the merchant through the Ebates site, you'll get a rebate on your purchase.
So let's say that you want Oprah magazine. You can get a year for $8.99 currently on eBay, but let's say that you can't for now. (Only a handful of the auctions are that low.) We go to MagazinePriceSearch. The best price is $19/year, with Magazines.com coming in near that with $19.97/year. However — EBates offers a 22% rebate for purchases from Magazines.com — that brings the subscription cost down to $15.58/year. This is better than the lowest price on MagazinePriceSearch!
I was introduced to MagazinePriceSearch.com by one of the readers of my newsletter way back when I posted this article. He responded with MagazinePriceSearch, adding that my newsletter was a joke!
I then e-mailed back to him, and beat every deal on the front page of MPS.com at the time using either eBay or EBates.
The moral of this story is: never mess with the Mighty Bargain Hunter! But seriously, no one place will ever have the best deal all the time. This is true not only for magazines, but for anything you might want to buy.
Cool piece. Thanks for the info.