How many hours a month do you spend doing mundane chores like shopping for groceries?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the average married parent spends somewhere from one to three hours each week shopping for groceries. While there were no published numbers for single folks, chances are they spend at least an hour a week doing the same chore.

Those 60 to 180 minutes a week add up. If you were able to cut the time you spent food shopping by even a third, you’d enjoy up to an hour of extra time each week. Add that up over the course of a year, and you’ve got yourself at least a free day.

Sound too good to be true? Well, online grocery shopping is finally coming into its own. By simply purchasing non-perishable items online, rather than in stores, you will not only minimize the time you spend, but you will most likely save money. What’s not to like about that?

Sarah on “Everyone Needs an Alice”

In the sitcom “The Brady Bunch,” Mrs. Brady, mom to six children, could always counts on her maid, Alice, to take care of the grocery shopping. As a working mom, I would give my left arm for my own Alice! I was an early tester of online grocery shopping.

Unfortunately, the process still took awhile (you couldn’t save a regular “basket” of goods for repeat purchasing, so there were no real shopping-time efficiencies) and it didn’t justify the shipping costs.

Or, if I ordered from a local store online, dealing with the delivery hassles (“please be sure you are home to meet the truck between the convenient hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.”) pretty much nullified any time savings.

But a new site, called Alice.com, has changed all that. It has thousands of those basic packaged goods for sale at prices that match those at stores like Target and Wal-Mart, an interface that actually reminds you of what you need to buy, and the shipping is always free. Best of all, the site has “taken all the coupons in the entire country and uploaded them,” so the savings is built-in and no clipping is required. That’s a huge bonus for anyone who struggles to clip and organize coupons, or even just remember to bring them to the store.

Alicia on “The Benefits of Technology”

One of the major benefits of online shopping is that comparison shopping and budgeting are much easier. At the click of a button, you can rearrange products to be displayed from the lowest- to the highest-priced, or quickly compare products on a price-per-unit basis. If you’re using a site like Alice.com, you can also see what products have coupons and the price with the coupon applied, something that you have to calculate by hand if you’re walking around an actual store. I also love that technology makes it possible for me to look at my budgeting – by category, by month – without doing anything. It is so simple and easy to track spending.

Here are a few simple steps you can take to set yourself up to maximize the time and money you save using the online grocery store, Alice.com.

•Invest Time in Setting Up Your Account. The first time you use the site, go through and select all of the products you buy on a regular basis and save them in the “My Products” section. That way, any time you decide to do your shopping, all you have to do is drag and drop the items you currently need into the shopping cart. As you select each new item, the site prompts you to estimate how often you will need to reorder it. Don’t stress too much about that number because you can always change it later. There is also a neat “Advanced Planning” tab that lets you drag and drop your products into reorder windows, with intervals such as two weeks, four weeks and four months. Once you have that setup, the site will automatically remind you by e-mail that you might be running low on a particular item.

•Take Advantage of the Budgeting Tool. A big reason most people don’t stick to budgets is because tracking spending is a pain. Who wants to spend time re-creating what you just spent on a budget form? Right from your first purchase, this site keeps track of how much you spend in each area of the house.

•Establish a Habit. Over time, the site will observe what you buy and will try to come up with a regular box delivery schedule if it gets enough data on your habits. Making the switch to online shopping can be a little bit strange at first, as you have to stop yourself from buying the “old” way (and last-minute runs are just not possible). So in the beginning, set up a regular time, whether that’s once a week or once every 10 days, where you just log on and get your shopping done.