Ben Palmer

How to buy genuine software online for less

Here are tips to help you purchase licensed software programs online at a price that is much less than the suggested retail price. You’ll also learn about useful sites that offer excellent deals on popular software titles. These include comparison shopping search engines, coupon code databases and sites that offer educational discounts on software to students and parents.

1. Always do comparison shopping (keep reading to learn about sites that offer comparison shopping for software). Never assume that the online software store you are looking at offers the best deal just because it’s popular.

2. Always remember to check extras like free shipping; this can turn one deal better than the other one even though it may look the opposite way when you look just at the price of the software.

3. If there is a software program that you want to purchase, go to the manufacturer’s website and subscribe to their email lists and also follow their blog, Twitter feed, or Facebook page. Many companies regularly post deals and offers through these channels so you can be the first one to find about new deals.

4. Make sure to purchase upgrade versions if you are eligible. Most companies discount upgrade versions of their software for people who already own an older version, and often upgrade versions are less than half the price of the full retail version. Run a software inventory check and you may discover software stuff you forgot you had.

5. Some companies will let you purchase a software program at upgrade price if you own a competing product, so be sure to check the company’s website for upgrade requirements before you buy.

6. Many software companies offer discounts on full versions of the software to registered users of a trial version of the software, or of the company’s limited versions of the same software or online services. They often also offer discounts on upgrades to registered owners of previous versions of software.

7. Before you buy software, always check how many computers a program is licensed to run on. For instance, Microsoft Office Home and Student is licensed for use on 3 computers in the same household, so if you have 3 computers in your home the price of Office is virtually 1/3 of what it would be. Some programs are available as family packs (like Windows 7) so if you can use all the licenses available in the family pack, then it is usually cheaper per computer.

8. If a program is available in multiple editions (e.g. Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite or Autodesk Suite), try picking the edition that has the features you need – you probably don’t need every single feature or component of a software suite and this will help you save a considerable amount over purchasing the top edition.

For instance, I purchased Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection last year but I only need Photoshop, Acrobat, Dreamweaver and Soundbooth (occasionally) so a better choice would have been the Web Premium bundle.

9. If you are planning to use coupon codes with the order, make sure that all of the promotions can work together. In most cases, multiple discounts cannot be clubbed so if an item is already on sale, it may not be possible to use coupons in the shopping cart.

10. Corel, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Symantec, Google (SketchUp) and many other software vendors offer large academic software discounts to faculty, staff members, and students of recognized educational institutions. These licenses are identical to the retail versions except that you cannot use the software for commercial purposes. As a parent, you can probably make use of such offers if your child is attending college.

11. You can sometimes buy an older version of the software at a lot cheaper price than the latest version.

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