ebates

Have you heard about ebates?  This is free money!!  I heard about ebates from Charlene over at About my Frugal Adventures about a year ago.  The deal is you register your account, which is free, then when you are doing any online shopping you start at ebates.  They have a huge selection of merchants and are adding more every day.  Of course, Amazon will not come out and play, but just about everybody else will. 

So say you want to order something from LL Bean.  You go to ebates and put it in the search box.  Up comes all these coupons for LL Bean with different offers.  I usually choose the most basic offer which tells me how much my ebate is going to be.  In this case, it will be 2%.  Then it takes you to the LL Bean site. After your order is completed be sure and copy the confirmation page that the merchant emails you into a folder.  What happens next is 2% of your order, say your order is $100 which is $2, will be posted to your account.  Every three months they send you a check!  You will be surprised at how quickly your account grows.  Sister Miss SmartyPants buys as many office supplies and equipment for her business as she can through them, so she is always getting a good check.

There is another little goodie with this deal.  The "ebates daily double."  This is where you can really clean up if you are paying attention and I always am.  You can sign up to have the "daily double" sent to your email or smart phone.  I check it first thing every morning.  Miss MoneyPenny is patient and you have to be to stretch your bucks.  I have a handful of merchants that I use and I keep an ongoing list of what I need from them.  When the "daily double" hits, I'm on it.  Example: my dogs have fleas...sorry girls for telling your secrets, so when PetCareRx hits, I'm all over it.  Usually PetCareRx is 12%, so that means 24%!  The way I work this deal is to use a coupon for $10 off $35, free shipping and my American Express card.  What happen is, I get $10 off, free shipping, 24% added to my account and 1% added to my credit card's rewards program.  You will never beat this deal anywhere.  If so, I want to hear about it.

The hitch is that you have to make sure that your ebate has been added to your account.  It usually happens within 48 hours.  If it hasn't shown up by the time I receive my shipment, I click on "tracking tickets", then "click for customer care" and a form pops up to fill in.  This is where your saved confirmation comes in.  Miss CutiePie and I were talking one day about how sometimes our account was not credited and we didn't do anything about it because it is free money.  Not my sister, the accountant.  She came up with the idea of saving the confirmation page and it works every time.  After filling in the form and pasting in the confirmation page, my account is always credited within a few minutes.

This is another one of those everybody wins deals.  The merchants pay them a commission every time we make a purchase and then ebates shares it with us.  I've heard that there are other programs like this on the web.  I don't do a huge amount of shopping, so unless somebody is offering a better deal, I'm staying with these guys.  I really enjoy getting those checks.

Note: you can almost always find the PetCareRx coupons in the Sunday inserts.