Countdown to a Frugal Holiday: Shopping Portals

Today is Cyber Monday, and according to the National Retail Federation, 96.5 million Americans will log on to do some kind of shopping. While that’s hardly the number that braved early hours and freezing temperatures to score deals on Black Friday (195 million shoppers), it’s a pretty significant group that will be online today.(Wonder how many websites will freeze up or crash because of this?)

That’s why I wanted to remind you that if you do shop online–today, tomorrow or whenever–you might want to consider using a shopping portal. These are the kinds of sites that you visit first, then click through to whichever retailer you’re looking to buy from–and in the process you earn cash back or extra discounts.

There was a recent story in the New York Times called “Site-Hopping for Holiday Savings” that highlighted some shopping portals and how they can help make your dollar go further this holiday season. Here are a few of those mentioned in the story:

• Ebates is basically a free service that allows you to get electronic “rebates” by stopping there first to do your online shopping. According to Ebates online retailers want your business and will pay Ebates a “commission” for directing traffic to their sites. When Ebates gets such a commission, it splits it with the shopper (you!). Truth is you get that cash in the form of a gift card and then you have limited choices. But it’s worth checking out.
• Upromise rewards you for going shopping through its site by putting money aside in your kids’ college savings account–a 529 plan. Supposedly you can earn up to 25% back on your purchases when you visit one of the 600 participating retailers.
• Fatwallet lets you earn cash back for your purchases and helps you to earn coupons to use on future purchases. Some of its participating e-tailers include Walmart, The Apple Store and Bloomingdales.
• Credit card-specific sites. Many credit cards that already offer you benefits, like earning gift cards to your favorites stores, allow additional ways for you to earn cash back–namely shopping through their online sites. According to the New York Times stories, American Express, Discover, Bank of America and Chase have shopping portals customers can use. (Wish I’d known this before we did all of our Black Friday shopping online Thursday night–we have two Chase-issued cards!)

On the other end of the spectrum are third-party sites that let you earn points you can cash in for stuff, just by visiting their site first–you don’t have to be going to another site to shop. For example, I have a couple of Facebook friends who use the site Swagbucks.com–I know this because whenever they use the site, it gets posted to their status update.

Here’s how Swagbucks works: when these folks need to search for something on the web, they visit the Swagbucks website first (instead of going right to Google or Yahoo) and then they earn Swagbucks “points” for each search they do. Eventually, they can cash their points in for items on Swagbucks, such as gift cards to iTunes or Barnes & Noble.

Do you use shopping portals to earn extra benefits? If so, let us know how they work for you–and if you know of other sites that are worth mentioning.