Mighty Bargain Hunter

Six click-through rebate sites

May 16th, 2009 | by mbhunter |

If you’ve shopped on the Internet — and if you’re reading this, you probably have — then you know that there are great deals to be had just about everywhere you look.  You’ve probably also stumbled across sites that make online shopping even sweeter by giving you a kickback on your online purchases just for clicking through their site.  The more you buy from merchants on their site, the more they pay you.

Now, they’re not just being nice guys in giving you free money, of course.  They get paid more for closing the sale than they pay out to you as a rebate.  But regardless how they can get the money to you, it’s yours for the taking if you want it!

Here are a few sites for your rebating pleasure.

EBates – This is the first rebate site I heard about.  I heard about it in 2002.  A friend pointed me toward it when I was making some big purchases.  I got my first Big Fat Check™ and wrote about it on the site even before it was a blog. That was a long time ago.   But anyway, the site is still going strong, with hundreds and hundreds of stores and a great sign-up bonus.  You get $5 for signing up.  They pay out Big Fat Checks  quarterly, and as long as you’ve earned $5.01 or more in rebates by their cut-off, you score a check.  To accumulate rebates, just log in and click through to the merchants from their site instead of going there directly.  That’s it!

UPromise – I’ve talked about before: you can set up a few things once, forget about them, and still get rebates that go into your UPromise account for the benefit of someone’s college expenses.  Beyond that, you can also click through to merchants and get rebates in your account that way.  This site combines online rebate offerings with other offline rebates, so it’s a great weaponto have in your rebate arsenal.

FatWallet – Rebates, coupons, deals, steals, and over 1 million users. Plus, they have a cool little Firefox plugin that goes right into your title bar and will let you know if the merchant you’re visiting participates in FatWallet’s rebate program. If the swirl is red, it reminds you to go back to FatWallet to click through there for the rebate. Pretty slick!

MyPoints – I use MyPoints quite a bit.  You can read a few e-mails and earn free gift cards without spending a dime, or you can shop and earn them faster.  Calculating the equivalent percentage rebate is a little bit of a trick, but a merchant that pays 3 points per dollar is the equivalent of a 2% rebate, and 10 points per dollar is about a 7% rebate.  ($10 gift cards go for about 1450 points.)  Join MyPoints and check it out!

InboxDollars – This site has an e-mail component similar to MyPoints as well as opportunities to earn money for surveys and other offers.  It does have a shopping component as well.  There’s a $5 bonus to start at InboxDollars, and you earn 10% of what people you refer earn.  I have yet to try any of the surveys but the cash bounties on a few of the offers seem pretty sweet.

Mr. Rebates – It’s a shame I hadn’t caught this one earlier!  They’ve been around for a while.  Much like EBates, Mr. Rebates has rebates tied to hundreds of online merchants.  There’s a $5 bonus to start, payout is a low $10, and you can earn 20% of what anyone you refer earns.  It’s stood the test of at least a few years so I signed up and I’ll give it a shot!

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