Today is the day when Americans head back to the office after a restful and foodful Thanksgiving long weekend, fire up their computers, and get back to the serious business of... shopping. Cyber Monday is the traditional kickoff day for online retailers' holiday season and the discounts will be flying fast and furious. But no matter how great the listed sales prices are, you should always take a moment before hitting the Checkout button to see if there are any other special offers on what you're buying out there.
There are many sites that provide codes that you can enter to get all sorts of extra deals from free shipping to buy-one-get-one promotions to simply taking x dollars or y percent off your total. Some of the more popular sites are retailmenot.com, couponcabin.com, and dealtaker.com.
However, your best bet is simply to go to your favorite search engine and type in the name of the product you're looking for or the store you're buying from with the words "coupon code" (without the quotation marks) and see what comes up. Often there are special partner or affiliate promotions that might not show up on these major sites.
For example, let's say you're shopping for your outdoorsy niece, and you've found a backpack you think she'll like on rei.com. Simply Google (or Bing or Yahoo...) "rei coupon code" and you'll get a long list of sites offering discount codes.

Click on a few links to see what's on offer. Note that sometimes you'll get an actual code that you can enter when you're checking out of the store while other times you need to click on a link that takes you to the online store with a code included in the URL that will automatically apply the discount during checkout. (This can be a bit of a nuisance if you've already added a bunch of stuff to your shopping cart on the regular store, so you might want to do your coupon search before actually browsing the store's site.)

Most online stores offer some kind of discount code these days, and some of the best deals are for tech-related products and services. (I've gotten coupons for 50% off software before that I never would have found elsewhere.)
How about you? Have you scored any sweet deals from using discount codes? Share your success stories in the comments section.
Happy Clicking!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
THanks for the reminder! I checked before ordering a number of gifts from one site yesterday; each gift was going to a different address. As a result, I was able to save about $70 in shipping costs!
That’s great news. Hope you find even more deals!