Which saves you more money?

You are ordering from an online catalog and you have access to two coupons (of which you can only use one of course). The two coupons are: 15% off $75 or more, and free shipping on orders $68 or more (shipping seems to cost about $10.50 for an order of $68). So assuming you are a pretty savvy shopper and you only purchase 5% more than the minimum amount required for each coupon, which coupon should you use?? (We’ll assume we are in New Hampshire so there is no sales tax on clothing)

$75 * .05 is $3.75, so the first coupon total price will be $78.75. When I apply my coupon I receive 15% off. So $78.75 * .15 = $11.81 dollars off. The total sale would be; 78.75 – 11.81 = 66.94. Now we know shipping is approximately10.50 for an order of that size so our final price would be $66.94 + $10.50= $78.44. So the price of our items was 78.75 and our total price for the shipping and items is 78.44 with the coupon. That’s not bad! We did a little bit better than just free shipping…

Now let’s look at the second coupon. We will pick out $68 + 5% worth of merchandise. (68 *.05 = 3.4) (68 + 3.4 = 71.4). So we pick out $71.40 worth of clothing to use the second coupon with. Then we receive free shipping (a $10.50 savings).

Therefore I claim that given these circumstances it totally depends on how much merchandise you want to buy. If you are buying between $68 and $75 worth of stuff- then use the free shipping (because you can’t use the other coupon anyways). Otherwise take the 15% off and pay for shipping. Unless, of course, your shipping is more expensive at which point the free shipping may save you more (who wants to pay $50 shipping for an appliance or something?). Really, as it turns out, the solution to this problem is, “It depends.”