Holiday Shopping - Part 2

In my last post on holiday shopping, I covered some of the sites I use to find out about good deals. Today I'm going to talk about something I've covered before - rebate/referral sites. I've talked a bit about these sites before (see my earlier post on Ebates) - but when I started researching this stuff for this post, I learned that I'd only covered the tip of the iceberg. Prepare to be enlightened (as I was!).

The name of the game in online retailing is traffic - driving as much traffic to your site as possible. Big retailers like Overstock.com and Amazon.com spend all kinds of money on TV and print ads, etc. Smaller retailers put banner ads up on other sites, etc. Because it's costly to get traffic to your site, online retailers are willing to pay to acquire visitors. That's where these rebate/referral sites fit into the equation. They serve as the middle man in the online transaction, sitting between you the buyer and the online retailer. The online retailer pays the referral site a percentage of the total value of the transaction and the referreal site pays you part of that fee. Best of all, all you have to do is go through one of these referral sites on your way to buy something you were going to buy anyway - it's like free money!

The big 'A-HA' moment I had when looking up information for this posting was realizing that there are sites out there that do more than just give you a cash back rebate. There are referral/rebate/reward (whatever you want to call them) sites that give cash rebates, some that give frequent flyer miles, some that put money in college savings accounts, some that give you US Savings Bonds - there are tons of them and they come in a bunch of varieties. But how do you now which one to use and how do you find them? I'm here to help with that.

If cash rewards - whether they be in the form of cash rebates, savings bonds, college savings, whatever - are what you're interested in, the chart posted at Comparerewards.com is an invaluable resource. You can get it HERE.

What the chart shows you is a breakdown of retailers and rewards/rebates sites - highlighting the best site to use for each retailer you're interested in. So, for example, if you're trying to shop at Buy.com, you'd look at the chart and see that BondRewards.com is paying the highest referral fee for Buy.com - so it makes sense to click through that site on your way to do your shopping. FYI, the chart compares 21 different referral sites:

BabyMint, BondRewards, ClubMom, CreationsRewards.net, Ebates, Extrabux, FatWallet, Freeride, Greenpoints, iBakeSale, Jellyfish, LittleGrad, MedicalRewardsNetwork, Memolink, MrRebates, MyPoints, MyTroops, QuickRewards.net, QuizPoints, SunshineRewards, and uPromise

That's a lot of programs and a lot of info to digest!

If you are interested in other types of rewards (things like airline miles) or aren't into searching through charts listing a bunch of percentages and want something SIMPLE, head over to Evreward.com. This is a new site that does the searching for you. You type in the retailer you're going to shop and it tells you all the different deals/referrals/rebates you can get for that retailer. It's really easy.

So - back to the Buy.com example - I type in Buy.com and the site tells me about all the cash back sites I can use, but it also tells me that I could be getting 2 Delta miles for every dollar spent or 3 AMEX Rewards points for every dollar spent. The site also includes coupon codes and hot deals that are displayed in your search listings. This is a cool site and, if you're just getting started in the referral site game, where I would start.

Happy shopping! Enjoy the free money/rewards!