Save On Your Shopping this Holiday Season: 3 of My Favorite Online Resources

I've shared a few tips before of little and easy ways I've found to save money, without having to make any real sacrifices. Today I wanted to introduce another tactic that you can use whenever you do any online shopping to get cash back for your purchases (which is especially timely if you prefer to do most of your Christmas shopping online like I do!).

Get cash back for online shopping

One of my favorite sites is Mr. Rebates, a completely free site that links to various online merchants that you'd normally shop at. When you are going to buy something online, log into Mr. Rebates first and see if they have any affiliations with the site you'll be shopping at. Then, all you have to do is click on the link from their site to the merchant of your choice and continue your purchase as usual. By clicking from their site to the merchant site, you'll actually get a percentage of your purchase back as a rebate. 

For example, if you were going to buy something from CafePress, they recently were running a special where you could get 22% of your purchase price back if you clicked through the Mr. Rebates link to the store and made your purchase. The thing I like especially with Mr. Rebates (as opposed to other cash-back shopping sites), is that the percentages they reward are often higher than those at other sites. Then, once you accumulate at least $10 in rebates, you can get the rebates sent to you via check or PayPal.

I've been using Mr. Rebates for a couple years now, and have cashed my rebates out (via PayPal) every couple of months, resulting in receiving more than $200 back over the lifetime of my account. And that's just with minimal shopping! Plus, if you sign up for Mr. Rebates, you'll get a $5 credit in your account to begin with.

Click here to sign up for Mr. Rebates (and get a $5 credit to your account). 

Find the best deals on Amazon

Another of my favorite shopping sites is Amazon.com. You can find almost anything there, and usually their prices are lower than what you'll find elsewhere. The thing is, though, that the prices often fluctuate. That's why I like the site CamelCamelCamel.com, which tracks Amazon prices and will let you know what the historical high and low prices are for an item and can alert you when a product hits any threshold you've set.

I've used this multiple times to make sure I'm getting the best deal possible. (And then, of course, I always make sure to pay my purchases with the Amazon gift codes I earn for free from Swagbucks, a search engine where you can earn points for the searches you do or for completing other tasks. Click here to learn more about Swagbucks and how to get started earning free gift cards from them.)

Plus, if you're going to do any shopping at Amazon, click through my affiliate link and Life Blessons will earn a small referral percentage back from any purchases you make--free for you, but it helps support everything that goes on here!

Use online coupons and free-shipping codes

Finally, another favorite shopping site in my online arsenal is RetailMeNot.com. It is like a search engine for coupon codes. You simply type in the store or website you want to shop at, and it will see if there are any available codes (for percent or dollars off your purchase or free shipping codes, which you sometimes can stack together in one purchase).

I like that you don't have to worry about signing up for store emails or anything to get the codes; they're all collected in one place (and they've collected codes for a ton of sites) so it really is a one-stop shopping. Combined with Mr. Rebates and any gift cards earned from Swagbucks, and your savings from online Christmas shopping this season will really add up!

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