Here are 4 tips to save money when you buy stuff from Jet.com

Jet.com

You might have heard of Jet.com, the buzzy online retailing startup that's taking on Amazon, Walmart, Target, and pretty much any company that sells anything, whether online or brick and mortar.

Jet.com's premise is a bit different from other retailers, though. It promises to save you money by pulling costs out of shipping, distribution, processing, and more, and then passing those on to you.

Discounts on products change depending on what else is in your shopping cart, for example, so shopping on Jet is a bit different than buying on other sites.

We recently sat down with Marc Lore, Jet's CEO, at the company's Hoboken, New Jersey headquarters. Lore knows a thing or two about retail — before starting Jet, he founded and ran Quidsi.com, the company behind Diapers.com, Wag.com, Soap.com, and more, and sold it to Amazon for about $550 million in 2010.

Lore told us how consumers can save money shopping on Jet.com.

Order a lot of stuff!

The more you order, the more you save. Before you dismiss this as a marketing gimmick that's just aimed at getting you to buy more, consider the logic behind this. 

Lore explained to Tech Insider that shipping is by far the biggest cost that goes into an e-commerce transaction. Companies that offer free shipping — Jet offers it for orders more than $35 — include the cost of shipping in the cost of the product, Lore said. 

But here's the thing — if you're buying more than one item, and it's coming from the same warehouse and going to the same place, the marginal cost to ship an additional item is significantly smaller than if you were buying it on its own. 

"If you put more stuff in the same box, and you're going to the same place, [shipping] doesn't cost that much more," Lore told Tech Insider. "So if you want to drive down shipping as a percentage of revenue, you get more things in the same box."

To explain it another way, if you're already ordering diapers and toothpaste, it doesn't cost that much more in terms of shipping to add some dish washing detergent to that box. 

"The bigger a basket gets, the more money we can give back, because the differential in what's embedded in the marginal cost gets bigger," Lore said.

Look for Smart Items

Smart Items save you more money than regular Jet products, so look for those. These items drop in price as you add them to your cart because they're coming either from the same warehouse as something else already in your cart, or close to items that are already in your cart.

You can ask that Jet to show you only Smart Items when searching for products.

Give up your right to return the product for free.

Last year, American consumers returned a whopping $284 billion worth of merchandise, according to National Retail Federation figures cited by CNBC.

Processing and restocking the returned products costs retailers a lot of money, and retailers account for that by including some of those costs in your products.

Jet.com gives you the ability to waive your right to free returns to save a few cents on every product. I found it was only a few cents on each product — it ranged from $0.01 to $0.26 per product on 16 products I put in a shopping cart — but you can see that it adds up to a few dollars per order if you're buying a large number of goods.

If you do need to return a product, and you've waived the right to free returns, Jet will charge you what it calls a Waiver’s Remorse Fee.