Fly into savings on just about everything with Jet

Shrewd shoppers will do a lot to save money. They’ll take time clipping coupons, shopping around for sales at different stores, watching for buy one, get one free deals, and scouring the Internet for promo codes. Shopping online is often a great way to save money, and Amazon has tried to corner the market for getting bargains on all of the stuff you need.

Now, a new name has gone public in online shopping, and it’s supposedly going to be the Amazon killer. The name of that new shopping service is Jet, and it’s available for your shopping needs both on the Web and through an iOS app. Jet was launched by Marc Lore, cofounder of Diapers.com, a company that Amazon purchased in November 2010.

The first thing you need to know about Jet is that it’s a savings club with a membership fee. An annual subscription to Jet will set you back $49.99, but your first purchase gets you a three-month trial membership. The way Jet works, you can easily find yourself saving more in a year than the $49.99 membership fee. This is because the more items you add to your shopping cart, the more you save.

Jet carries a wide variety of products, from small items like toothbrushes to bigger things like lawn tractors. A tour through Jet’s product categories yields everything from electronics to office supplies to home decor items. Jet has managed to develop a huge collection of different products for sale, and it is lacking only clothing to make the online shop a true department store.

Jet seems to look to Amazon as the temperature gauge for its prices, offering a menu option from the Web page to check the competing retailer’s prices on every item you look at. I didn’t go through every single product for sale on Jet, but the selection I did check matched Amazon’s initial price. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t provide that same price checking option. Where Jet can really give Amazon a run for its money, though, is in the savings you accumulate when you add items to your cart.

For example, a Troy-Built 21-inch self-propelled mower is $522.47 on both Amazon and Jet. If you add the same mower to your shopping cart at Jet, though, you instantly save $155.11 off your total order. Not every item has savings, and most are certainly not that much, but it gives you a picture of how you might save money shopping with Jet.

Will Jet actually be an Amazon killer? I doubt that very much, but it is clear that the new retailer could give Jeff Bezos and his team a reason to stop and think about upcoming promotions and sales. Even if you do have to pay $49.99 per year for Jet’s membership, the savings on products from books to vacuum cleaners could easily make up the difference. The iOS app for Jet is a free download on the App Store.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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