Widget & Whatnot Wednesday - Ebates.com

I’m going to try to make it a point to share cool tech stuff, gadgets, toys, websites, and other neat stuff I happen upon once a week on what I'm naming "Widget & Whatnot Wednesday." Which is also a play on www. since most of the stuff I come across has something to do or was found on the internet. I'll label all these posts WWW. I've always like to share neat stuff I come across, so I'm going to just try to do it once a week and focus just on that "thing." It will probably help to make it a little more searchable in the future too. Hope you enjoy!

I’d love to hear about cool stuff you find too, so be sure to share!

Today I’m sharing www.ebates.com. It’s something I’ve used, and I need to use more, since I seem to order a lot of stuff online.

Basically it’s a free service that if you go through their website to a zillion merchants and buy stuff online, you get a % rebate back.

Think of it like this, you know with school fundraisers they have gift cards to sell and depending on the merchant, the school gets back like 3% of the face value of the gift card sold? It’s like that but instead of the school getting that 3% back, you get it back in a quarterly check. How cool is that? And yes it works because I’ve gotten 2 quarterly checks back.

And it’s all free. No clue how it works, why it works, but it does.

All you have to do is go online and sign up at www.ebates.com and you will be on your way. Then you can scroll through the umpteen website companies that participate in their program, and most of the ones you would want to shop with are there.

I’ve got to get back in the habit of using Ebates more often again, but whenever you want to buy something online, start at ebates and then click on the merchant from there and then it keeps up with what you buy. You can see what your % refund for that merchant will be (orbitz and travel companies are on there too, which is good when I buy flights for work and can get rebates on them!!) and you will get a check.

Pretty painless, just gotta remember to go through ebates.