How to Save Big This Holiday Season: Part 1 - Ebates

Hi everyone!

With Black Friday 8 days away, and the holiday shopping season rapidly approaching, I thought it would be nice to do a series of posts for the next few days about how to save money.

Today, I'm featuring a site called e-bates. It's something I've mentioned before on the Facebook page and if you do online shopping a lot, you have no excuse for not partaking in this. No, seriously. You don't.

To enroll in their free program, you go to Ebates.com and sign up. From there, you can click through to most major online retailers and do your normal shopping. After you place an order, you are automatically awarded a certain percentage of cash back to your Ebates bank.

Each retailer has a different percentage they offer. For example: Apple offers 1% (that's $5 bucks right there on an iPad), Ulta and Sephora give 4%, and ProFlowers offers 12%. Even travel companies offer cash back and that's a really opportunity to make back some money. Have you looked at air travel lately? (Let's just say my family booked our flights to Florida Christmas week and I found $36 in my savings. You do the math!)

And BONUS: They not only let you use coupon codes, each retailer page on Ebates list ALL AVAILABLE COUPON CODES! How convenient is that?

I also HIGHLY recommend this for Black Friday shopping online. I know that I personally spend the most money on Black Friday, so it's my biggest chance to make money back. And if you have a cash back credit card, you're basically doubling that money. It's pretty cool.

Right now, Ebates is offering a promo that upon your first purchase of $25 or more (um, really? I drop that at Ulta alone in twenty minutes), you automatically get your choice of $10 gift cards. Easy, right?

Please note: You MUST click through Ebates to whatever online retailer you shop through in order to get the credit. It might help to set it as a homepage on your internet browser.

So really, if you shop online, there's no excuse to be lazy and not get cash back. What are you waiting for? Go get your $10 gift card and start collecting your cash back today! I know it doesn't seem like a lot now, but you'll be surprised after Christmas passes just how much you earned. Especially if you're an online shopping addict.

Tomorrow, I'll be sharing all of my Black Friday tips for you late night/early morning shoppers out there!

Do you think this will help you out this holiday season? Let me know!
Princess Polish

Disclosure: The links above are referral links. If you do not want to use my referral, you can go to Ebates.com and sign up on your own.

DEAL ALERT: CVS

I traveled to CVS yesterday on my way home from class and wound up finding some GREAT nail polish bargains. Okay, so maybe I took a detour and somehow wound up in East Brunswick. Sue me.

Regardless, there are some awesome clearance deals going on at CVS right now, aside from the Sally Hansen BOGO 1/2 off sale and the Spend $10 get $4 ECB wyb any Revlon Cosmetics deal.

I found a TON of Sally Hansen polishes in the clearance area. Everything from Insta-Dry to Diamond Strength to Color Quick Nail Pens. All 75% off. Now, there was a coupon out a while ago for $.50 off any SH polish, so with the coupon, the polishes cost me a grand total of $18 instead of the retail of $106. MAJOR score in my book.

There are also some Borghese on sale for $7.99 and Orly for $6.29, but I don't think they're big enough bargains that I'm willing to splurge, no matter how much I'm lemming Borghese Stellar Notte. And that's a lot.

So I hope that you can have as good of a haul as I did at CVS. While you're there, make sure you sign up for the Beauty Bucks program so that you can get your 10% off cosmetics coupon that you can use that day, as well as the CVS Extra Care card if you don't already have one. Believe me, it pays off. Big time.

Happy Bargain Hunting!
Danielle