Five ways to save money when buying online

Here's how to buy and save when shopping online: 

5. Ask and you will, probably, receive discounts

Nam Y. Huh/AP/File
Michael Hammen, left, and Eliana Blancas purchase a Sony PlayStation 4 at Lincoln Park Best Buy store in Chicago last week. Just because you shop online, doesn't mean you can't ask for a discount.

If you aren’t satisfied with your price at checkout, contact the site you are buying from and ask for a deal. Most reputable merchants will reply to your inquiry, and the majority will work to meet your request.

Online retailers often have an abundance of discount codes and special offers reserved for customer service inquiries or incomplete purchases. A discounted purchase is better than no purchase in a retailer’s mind. Thus, they usually offer a select group of customers, such as frustrated customers or those who have abandoned online shopping carts, special discounts to ensure a purchase is completed.

Rather than first experiencing a negative shopping experience, or abandoning your online shopping cart for days in hopes that the retailer will e-mail you a discount code, you can take the proactive route and simply ask. By approaching the retailer directly and asking for a buying incentive, such as a promo code or free shipping, you save time, energy and, with any luck, a decent amount of money. 

Kara Kamenec is the commerce editor for Ziff Davis and editor for LogicBuy, a website dedicated to bringing consumers the best laptop deals and technology discounts from around the Web.

5 of 5

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“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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