Do you want to save money when buying from Amazon.com? One of the easiest ways to save money when buying from Amazon.com is to make use of their 30 day post-order price guarantee. Basically, if the price of an item you have purchased is lowered within 30 days of the item being shipped to you, you quality for a refund of the difference.

There are some conditions you need to be aware of though. The main condition is that the items you purchase must be directly from Amazon.com and not a third party that is selling via the Amazon.com website. It is usually easy to tell if the item you are purchasing is coming directly from Amazon.com. The downside is that the Amazon.com pricing isn’t always the cheapest so you may pay a little more up front for the possibility of saving more in the end.

Recently I purchased a new camera from Amazon.com and I made sure to buy it directly from Amazon and not a third party. The reason for this was I actually had some Amazon.com gift card balance I wanted to use up so the final price to me wasn’t much more than the lowest price available at the time. The camera was approximately $278 at the time of my order. Within a week of the camera shipping, the price had dropped substantially – down to approximately $245. I hadn’t even taken the camera out of the box and I had already “over paid” by $30.

Now, the trick with claiming a refund is you need to know that your item has dropped in price. There are many automated ways to do this, just Google for “amazon price watch” or “amazon product watch” and you should find many. I opted for the slightly more work approach. After I completed my order I went back and added the exact same items to my cart. This way I could quickly login to Amazon.com and check my cart to see if there was a price change. Amazon.com is very good at placing a nice notification at the top of the page when you view your cart if there has been a price drop. They even include the dollar amounts for you.

If you have a price drop, send a message to the Amazon.com customer service. As long as it has been less than 30 days, when you sign into the customer service area, it should find your recent orders. Select the item(s) you want to claim a refund on and provide explicit detail in your email as to what you want. I found it was best to take the extra time and be explicit, including the exact dollar amount in refund you are requesting. If you don’t remember how much you originally paid, you can look-up your original order through the your account inteface.

The turn around time for a refund authorization is quite quick. I had both of mine within a day. The refund showed up on my credit card within a couple days.

Oh, and don’t think you can only get one refund. You can get a refund for any drop within 30 days. I actually got two refunds on my camera. The first was for the amount I mentioned above and the second was for a subsequent drop just before my 30 days expired. The second time I requested the refund, I was explicit about how much I had received already and how much additional I was looking for. Again, the turnaround time was very quick.

One last thing to note – I mention being explicit about what you are requesting. The reason for this is the first refund I received wasn’t actually correct and at the time I didn’t notice. It was off by a few dollars, and not in my favour. In my second request, I showed my math and how I got to the amount of refund I was looking for. This is probably a better approach if you only plan on submitting one refund request.

In the end, had I bought the camera from a third party through the Amazon.com site I would have paid almost $50 more for the camera. I wouldn’t have been able to get the benefit of the price drops that occurred after the camera was shipped to me. Sounds like a great way to save money when buying from Amazon.com.