Man, I love Amazon. It’s not that the site is easy to use, loads quickly, has great wishlist functionality, and ships virtually everything for free. It’s that you can save a heck of a lot of money if you do it right.

Last week, I decided that I no longer wanted to be the last kid on my cube block to have an iPod. I managed to control myself though and not buy one immediately. I looked around a bit for the best price (from someplace legitimate) and found that Amazon would be cheapest, at least for me.

Checking out dealmac, Amazon regularly has sales on the 40GB iPod for $463 or $36 off. I figured if I waited long enough, they would have another one. Sure enough, today they did and I snatched one up.

But I didn’t pay $463. I paid $362 after cashing in gift certificate from my last quarter’s referral credit and a certificate from my Amazon.com visa. Of course, this purchase will count towards credit for those same rebates, so I’ll get a $30 referral credit (to myself!) and another $12 back eventually for using their credit card.

Net cost: $362.69 or 27% off with no shipping and no tax. Not bad at all. And while I chose the free super saver shipping, they appear to be preparing it to ship right now. Sometimes I’ve even seen packages arrive from them before I got the shipping notice, literally overnight. Can you tell I’m excited? 🙂

40GB is a lot of music. Now I just need to figure out where to get cheap iPod accessories…

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UPDATE: I miscalculated the referral credit and my actual cost was $362! Woo hoo! It arrived today and iTunes is almost done copying 6,000 songs onto it. Yum.