Whenever I buy something online, I always look for the lowest price, and then try to find a coupon to make the price even lower.
But what’s the last thing I do right before I’m about to place an online order to make sure I save even more money?
I look to get cashback on my purchase.
What is cashback? It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a way to get cash back for buying something through a specific link.
Basically, you’ll get a percentage back of what you purchase. You typically won’t see it for a few months, but you’ll either get it as a check or PayPal (or sometimes you can choose a gift card to your favorite store as well.)
So you won’t see the savings right away, but you will get it, and every extra penny counts.
There are quite a few cashback sites, and since they are always offering different amounts of cashback, you can look around to see which one is offering the best for your purchase.
For example, let’s say you were shopping at the Under Armour website, since they’re having their semi-annual event right now. If you clicked through MrRebates link, you’d get 8% cashback. Rakuten (formerly eBates) has 3% cash back. BeFrugal has 5% cashback, and TopCashback has 10% cashback.
So if I was planning on spending $80, I’d get $6.40 from MrRebates, $2.40 from Rakuten, $4.00 from BeFrugal, and $8.00 from TopCashback. Obviously in this case I’d choose TopCashback and click to the Under Armour website through their link, so I’d get the most money back.
Isn’t that awesome though? Just for clicking through their website, they’ll give me $8.00 cash back.
Just in case you were interested: Why are they doing this? It’s simple. These companies are affiliates of these stores, and they’ll get a percentage of money when you make purchases through their links. They’re passing along some of that earnings to you! You don’t pay any more for going through their links, and instead they pay you. It’s great!
Now, how many you use is up to you. I personally have accounts at multiple cashback sites to that I can use whichever has the highest percentage. If you want to get paid sooner (usually there is a minimum they’ll send at a time) or don’t want to have to look up which company has the best cashback, you can just use one or two.
Also note that they change the percentages of cashback ALL of the time! So just because you’re going to get 10% cashback at a store one day, a week later they might only be offering 4%. That’s why I always check before I make my purchase, to see where I’ll get the best cashback, and use that link.
It’s something that takes just a few seconds (to go to another website and click through their link), and you can really end up getting a decent amount of money back!
What’s really cool is that since it’s “behind the scenes”, no one will know you’re using it. So you can still use it when buying a present, and they won’t see you got cash back. It’s something you can use all of the time, and really adds up!
These are the 4 cashback sites I use. There are more if you want to look for them, but I can tell you that these all pay out, as I’ve gotten paid from all of these sites:
MrRebates
TopCashback
BeFrugal – When you join and get cashback through them, you’ll get an extra $10 bonus!
Rakuten (Formerly eBates) – When you join and get cashback through them, you’ll get an extra $10 bonus!
