Do you Ebates?

If you're like me, you are doing more and more of your shopping online where great deals are to be had. Last Thanksgiving I avoided the lines and craziness at the stores and chose instead to shop online - and what great deals there were to be had! One of the best deals I saw was a KitchenAid on sale for $180 (retails $270, often on sale for around $200). By the time you made sure to purchase through a cash-back site, added a 20% off coupon, and sent in for the $20 rebate, the price ended up being more like $115 plus tax and shipping . . . plus on top of that you got $45 Kohls Cash to spend (which could go toward buying some other Christmas gifts). That's the equivalent of getting $245 worth of merchandise for $115 (plus tax & s&h)!

Wondering what a cash-back site is? It's a site that offers an incentive to click through their links to the store you pick. Basically, they get a referral commission from the store and pass some of it on to you.

One of my favorite cash-back sites is Ebates. Whenever I decide to make a purchase online, I go to Ebates.com and make sure to check if they offer cash-back at that particular online store. If they do, I click through their link which takes me to the store site, and I make my purchase! It's really that easy. They often offer double cash-back, like they are currently doing at many online stores for Valentine's Day. Just for an example, if you had purchased the above KitchenAid deal, you would have gotten about $6 cash-back from Ebates - may not seem like much, but it all adds up!

Some of the stores I've gotten cash-back from in the past 4 months have been Target, Walmart, JC Penney, Kohls, Coastal.com, and others. I've gotten anywhere from 1%-6% cash-back, (some store are even 10%, or there is a $7 bonus for signing up for 3 months of Weight Watchers)! Sometimes that percentage doesn't seem like much, but it all adds up! You get "paid" quarterly by your choice of check or Paypal as long as your total is above $10 - if it's not, it just rolls into the next quarter!

If you haven't signed up at Ebates yet, you can do so by clicking here: they are offering a bonus gift card when you sign up (which you will get after your first $25 purchase!)

So what are some of your favorite cash-back sites?

(Note: Some of the links in this post are referral links. Read our disclosure policy here)