Scour is changing the way it rewards its users.  Not for the better, unfortunately.

I received my third $25 Visa gift card from Scour today, and on checking out the site I found this link on the front page:

“Upgraded Rewards System Coming Soon!”

Uh-oh.

The social search engine site has had a point-based system for earning free gift cards for searching the web:  search, vote, and comment, and you work your way toward $25 Visa gift cards.

That’s all going to change as of September 1st, 2009.  Searches, votes, and comments will no longer accumulate from day to day.  After this month they will only be good for entries in a daily $25 giveaway.

All point accumulation will stop on September 1st, and if there are unused points in your account, they will be “upgraded” to extra daily entries in the daily $25 giveaways for the month of September.  Then they vanish into the Scour bit bucket.  Here is how your current points will be converted to September daily entries:

• 1 – 1,500 points: 25 daily search entries for 30 days
• 1,501 – 3,000 points: 50 daily search entries for 30 days
• 3,001 – 4,500 points: 75 daily search entries for 30 days
• 4,501 – 6,000 points: 100 daily search entries for 30 days
• 6,001 – 7,500 points: 125 daily search entries for 30 days
• 7,500 + points: 150 daily search entries for 30 days

This is very unfortunate. Scour was a decent ride while it lasted but now it’s aspiring to be a watered-down version of iWon.  Giving away $25 per day is nothing.  This “upgrade” is an upgrade only for Scour.  It is an obvious, and harsh, downgrade for everyone else.

Here’s how I’d make the best of it:

• If you’re around the 4,000-point mark, I’m really sorry. Getting 2,500 points in four weeks is a lot, and they might just think you’re cheating by getting so many points so fast.  But it’s always worth a shot, I suppose.  Just be careful in how you search and comment.
• If you’re around 6,000 points, you have time to reach the magic 6,500 points. Pace yourself (maybe 50 points/day) and get past 6,500 to cash out your $25 gift card.
• If you have over 6,500 points, you had better cash out your points, or I’ll hire somebody to pluck the petals off of all your flowers.  Trading a sure $25 for chances at $25 is dumb.  Cash them out right now!
• If you want to just get into the drawings for the September gift cards, join before the end of the month and earn 1 point. You’ll get 25 entries each day in September with no more work on your part.

After this turn of events, Swagbucks is looking much better.  It’s the same idea but you can still earn your way toward gift cards rather than forfeit your effort each day if you don’t win.

(Oh, by the way, the Swagbucks link is a referral link.  The Scour links are not.  They’ll go away sometime in September when I get around to it.)

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

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!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

MyPoints is a rewards program that gives you the opportunity to earn free gift cards by reading e-mails, completing surveys, and purchasing from online retailers through their site. Each action has a point value associated with it, it doesn’t take too long to earn gift cards, and many of the point opportunities are free.

There is a difference in the number of points it takes to earn gift cards from different merchants, though. Right now a $25 gift card from the participating merchants cost between 3,250 and 3,800 points. I’ve categorized these merchants below as having anywhere from cheap gift cards on MyPoints to expensive ones:

• Cheap cards: Bath and Body Works, Black Angus Steakhouse, Bloomingdale’s, Callaway Golf, Foot Locker, Gap, Harry and David, Lids.com, L.L. Bean, Macy’s, Magazines.com, Metromedia Restaurants, Newport News, Omaha Steaks, Spiegel, Timberland
• Somewhat cheap cards: Bass Pro Shops, Bon-Ton, Brunswick Zone, Chili’s, On the Border, Maggiano’s, Motherhood Maternity, Old Navy, Olive Garden, Overstock.com, Panera Bread, PBTeen, Pier 1 Imports®, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Red Lobster, REI.com, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Sally Beauty Supply, Staples, The Ritz-Carlton
• Moderately-priced cards: Applebee’s, Baja Fresh, California Pizza Kitchen, Cracker Barrel, Kohl’s, Lord & Taylor, Papa John’s
• Somewhat expensive cards: CVS Pharmacy, JC Penney, Lane Bryant, Outback Steakhouse®, Sears, SUBWAY®, Walgreens
• Expensive cards: BP, GameStop, GiftCertificates.ca, Home Depot, Hyatt, iTunes®, K-Mart, Lowe’s®, Shell, Steve & Barry’s, Target, Wal-Mart

Here’s my take on why the cheap ones are cheap and the expensive ones are expensive. The cheap cards are for merchants that either don’t have a lot of locations or ones that sell products with a very high markup. So it’s more of a “sell” to encourage people to get these gift cards. The expensive ones are for easily-found retailers that sell products at relatively low margin. Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot are good examples. These gift cards are likely more popular and thus MyPoints charges more for them to keep up with the demand.

Anyway, this is a pretty complete list of retailers that have free gift cards available on MyPoints. Again, the points are pretty easy to get, and they send the gift cards fast in my experience, so why not join MyPoints and get started?

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

I signed up for UPromise.com years ago and have largely forgotten about it except for the occasional e-mail update about my rewards. (UPromise is a company that has made deals with other companies to “give back” part of a sale as a contribution to a college fund of the member’s choice.)

Setting and forgetting is really nice, actually. Setting up reward programs that you can forget about and still get some benefit out of is a great, easy way to spend less. It’s possible to use UPromise more actively than we do, but getting any kind of reward on a recurring bases for a (mostly) a one-time investment of time is hard to beat.

The way we do this is we register our credit cards with UPromise, and register our participating grocery and drugstore shopping cards with UPromise as well. Doing this triggers rewards when we shop at those grocery stores and drugstores, and also triggers rewards for dining at participating restaurants (up to 8% of qualifying charges).

These rewards go right into our UPromise account; these can be linked eventually to qualifying educational accounts. These rewards are in addition to any rewards that we get from our Chase PerfectCard™ Mastercard® and any coupons we use.

This is an almost-brainless way to earn more rewards, so check out UPromise.com.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons