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Five ways to save money when buying online

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

3. Connect with brands

Sascha Schuermann/dapd/AP/File
An attorney holds an Apple iPad, left, and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 at a regional court in Duesseldorf, Germany, in 2011. You can 'friend' a brand to learn early about discounts and promotions.

  • By Kara Kamenec Contributor

Make "friends" with the brands you buy from and you’ll be first to learn about daily discounts and upcoming promotional offers. Now more than ever, brands actively reward online customer loyalty with member-only discounts and insider details of upcoming sales. Connect with brands by signing up for mailing lists, creating shopper profiles on brand websites, and following brands on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

If you want to avoid constant interaction with every brand, you can take steps to ensure brands communicate with you only on your terms. To avoid excessive e-mails, which can become bothersome as a result of your brand or website memberships, you can set filters on your inbox to send all brand and promotional e-mails to a specific in-box folder.  As an even easier option, use an entirely separate e-mail address when you sign up for memberships and check this second e-mail in-box only when you are looking to find savings.

To avoid intrusive status updates on Facebook that are overly promotional, you can ‘block from newsfeed’ all status updates from certain pages or brands. Using this method, you can still visit Facebook fan pages when you are actively looking for deals, without the inconvenience of seeing a daily promotional post.   

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“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.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

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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