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Five ways to save money when buying online

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

2. Shop anonymously

Mark Lennihan/AP
Joe Fresh fashions are displayed in the company's store windows on Fifth Ave. in New York in November. If a retail website knows who you are, it might charge you higher prices.

  • By Kara Kamenec Contributor

On most websites today your online activity is tracked all day long, and what companies do with this data does affect the products and prices you see. Online retailers, social networks, news sites, and many others track your online activity in order to deliver a more customized user experience, based on what links you have clicked, stories you have commented on or shared, and Web pages you have visited. Online personalization does have benefits, but when it comes to shopping, too personalized of a shopping experience can interfere with the results, including the prices that you see.

To combat an overly personalized shopping experience, it’s best to double check product availability and price on a second device. It’s as easy as taking out your smartphone and visiting the same online store to confirm what you see on your main computer matches what you see on your second screen.

If you can’t get to another device, there are other ways to shop anonymously. Be sure to sign out of Google, sign out of the shopping site you are on, and clear your browser data. To clear your browsing data, go to your browser menu, find and click on the “empty cache” or “delete browsing history” option, usually found under your settings or preferences tab. This will deliver a more unbiased picture of the actual site offerings and product prices. If you do see a lower price or better deal when shopping anonymously, e-mail the store and confirm that the lower price or deal will be honored when you go to make your purchase.  

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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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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