Hi! If you’re just finding CompareRewards.com for the first time, thanks to Gregory Karp’s article in today’s Chicago Tribune, “Christmas shopping: Move up your buying season to Labor Day,” let me welcome you to the site!
I think the advice given in the article is spot-on: pace yourself! There are some amazing bargains available right now, and if you start shopping early, by the time Black Friday’s here, you’ll already have quite a bit stockpiled!
What I provide here on CompareRewards, and I’ve been at this for 8 years now, is reviews, news, and tips on online shopping rewards programs — sites that pay you cashback (or points redeemable for gift cards) when you shop through THEIR link to the same popular big-name retailers you were going to shop at anyway. For instance, instead of going straight to Target.com or Sears.com, you would go to the rewards program’s website first and then click through to Target or Sears from there. They get a commission for referring your sale, and they share it with you (the cash or points mentioned above).
I do an annual comparison of how these programs compare with one another — will be starting work on this years’ version in about a month, but for a general benchmark, you may want to see last year’s analysis here. The best programs overall last year included Microsoft Live Cashback (renamed Bing Cashback earlier this year), Citibank’s ThankYou Points program (only available to Citibank customers), Extrabux (aff), MrRebates (aff), and FatWallet.
Expect to save anywhere between 1% and 30% cashback when you shop through a rewards site, with even greater savings than that through the use of the coupon codes many of these sites provide.
If you have any questions about these sites, how they work, or which one would be best for you, this is a subject I’m passionate about and I’d love to help if you want to send me an email!
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