Let’s get paid to shop, shall we?
Happy Sunday Funday!
With all of the end of the summer & anniversary sales going on (hello, #nsale!), I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share some of my favorite strategies for getting the most out of online sale shopping! A sale is always great, but saving a few dollars more (or, being PAID to shop) just feels that much better, doesn’t it? Below, you’ll find a few of my favorite online & mobile tools to get that extra bang for your buck (or Starbucks funds in your pocket ;).
Ebates has been around for ages and I always heard about how it would pay you back for shopping, but never got around to signing up. I’ll be the first to call it: the 1999-looking website, the “Big Fat Check” references and the corny TV ads were totally a turn-off. But last year when my husband and I began wedding planning (aka we were on an excessive shopping spree for the most random items for about four months), I thought ‘why not?!’ and signed up. Boy was I mad we didn’t do this sooner!
So let’s be honest, if you’ve signed up for online retail loyalty programs, you’ve likely signed off on retailers tracking what & when you shop (ever noticed that just after you check out a new t-shirt bra on VictoriasSecret.com you’ll get emails from Gap & Bloomie’s with their new lingerie within a week?). Well, when you sign up for Ebates, you’re pretty much giving them the OK to track and share your shopping habits with retailers too. But if they’re tracking you anyway, why not get paid for it?
Once you’ve signed up and installed the Ebates extension into your browser, you’ll start seeing cash back percentages pop up in a button when you shop on sites that have partnered with Ebates. When you check out on the site, activate the button and Ebates will track that percentage of your purchase (these range anywhere from 1% to 10%… I’ve even seen it hit 15% on some sites during the holiday season!).
At the end of the quarter, they’ll send you a “Big Fat Check” (their words, not mine) with the total of all the cash back percentages you’ve saved. I’ll be honest, the only website I frequent that doesn’t partner with Ebates is Nordstrom. Even the smallest, most random retailers seem to have jumped on the Ebates train and not just for low percentages. My husband ordered a new set of golf clubs last year from a golf equipment site featuring 10% Cash Back on Ebates, giving him over $80 in savings! The biggest check we’ve received so far (granted, it was during wedding planning when we were spending WAY more than usual), was over $400. Totally worth it!
To start saving with Ebates, sign up here or via the link below & get $10 when you make your first purchase using Ebates!
One extra Ebates perk? When you activate the Cash Back option, they also try to apply any and all available promotion codes to your order to save you even more, saving you the busy work of hunting them down!
Honey is another great saving tool that you can install into your web browser and activate as you shop. You won’t have a ‘bank’ to save percentages of your purchases, but it will try to apply available promo codes to your order to save you more.
One thing to note though – they don’t seem to be in cahoots with Ebates. When I’ve tried to apply both, one always seems to deactivate the other, so this might be best saved for those sites that aren’t partnered with Ebates.
ibotta is another sale app I’ve recently begun using. It’s not super helpful for all stores (and probably better suited for offline shopping), but great for grocery runs or random small deals like $1 savings with Uber. In a nutshell, you check the app before you go shopping, see if it has deals on anything on your list (these aren’t just random cans of beans… they have cash back deals on things like milk, toilet paper and other essentials), then you scan your receipt after you’ve made your purchase and the app will add a portion of your activated items to your ibotta account. Once you’ve saved $5, you can redeem your savings via PayPal. Pretty simple!
Sign up for ibotta here & receive a $10 welcome bonus!
Paribus is another new fave and hardly requires any work on your end. Download the app, link it to your email, and Paribus will scan your email for recent online purchases and track them to see if the prices drop within a two-week window. If they drop more than 10%, Paribus will reach out to the retailer on your behalf to see if they’ll honor the price drop and refund you the difference. They do take a cut of the savings they bring back to you (25%) but, if you refer a friend and they sign up and use Paribus, the app will drop that “fee” by 5%. I’ve only had the app for a few months, but it did save me $17 on a sweater I bought, so I’d say it’s worth trying!
Sign up for Paribus here to save 5% on their “fee” when they make a successful claim on your behalf!
Happy shopping everyone!
xo | M