When you’re getting 5.5% – 7% of credit card cash rebate on online transactions, you’re probably folding your arms and telling yourself, “well done”. But wait, there’s more! You can get further cash rebate with Ebates for your online shopping. The merchants include popular online stores, hotel booking (virtually all the hotel chains are there) and car rental, so before you make any online transaction on a US site, it pays (literally) to search if the merchant is on Ebates. You will more likely than not find them there.
A sample of the rebates you can get:
| Merchant | Cash Back |
|---|---|
| ebay | Up to 5% |
| Amazon | Up to 3% |
| booking.com | 2% |
| Agoda | 3% |
| hotels.com | 6% |
| REI | 2.5% |
| Oshkosh B’gosh | 2.5% |
| Gap | 4% |
| Newegg | 1% |
So how do you get paid? You can choose to be paid via cheque or PayPal. You’ll only get paid every quarter if you have accumulated US$5.01 or more of cash back. I opted to be paid through PayPal since i do use PayPal to pay for online shopping.
In order to receive the cash back, one must first go to ebates.com, search for the merchant and get redirected to the merchant site from there. This is how they link your transaction with the merchant to your Ebates account. You must perform your transaction within that same browser tab in which you were redirected to the merchant site. This presents a problem when the merchant site launches new tabs upon your selection (e.g. this happens on booking.com – when you select a hotel, a new tab is launched to show you the hotel reservation details). To get around this, copy the url in the newly launched tab and paste it back into the original Ebates enabled tab.
Before you get used to using Ebates, i can tell you from experience that you will keep forgetting to activate Ebates first before you do anything else. Ebates provides you a tool to help remind you – the Ebates cash back button, which works on Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
So what are you waiting for? Start using Ebates.
Update 14/11/2015: Shopback is fast becoming my favourite cashback site, now that almost all the online merchants i patronize can be found on Shopback. I’ll likely continue to use ebates for ebay purchases though.
Get S$5 when you sign up for Shopback!
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