The Rakuten (formerly Ebates) cash back shopping network is currently offering a $10 Gift Card bonus when you open a new account and spend $25 or more at your favorite store. Plus, you can earn $75 when you refer 3 of your friends with the special Tell-A-Friend promotion. Ebates is one of the largest free cash back shopping portals that offers up to 25% in cash rebates when you shop online at over 1,500 brand-name stores and service providers. I’ve made over $800 using Ebates the past few years just because I click on their link before I make a purchase.
You only earn a $5 per referral normally but right now Ebates is giving you a $20 bonus for each of the first three referrals. This means that you will earn $25 for one referral, $50 for two or $75 for three. Even if you only refer one or two people this works out to be a great deal. The people your refer also get a $10 gift card as well so everyone wins. In order to earn your $10 Gift Card bonus, they must spend $25 or more from clicking on a link in their shopping portal.
With Ebates you can shop with Amazon and Amazon Local, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot to mention some of the bigger brands. Groupon has been one of my favorites as they normally pay around 6% and I am always buying something on You can also turn around and redeem that cash back reward for a gift certificate to one of those stores or for cash through Paypal. Ebates is FREE to join and its easy to just open up Ebates.com in your browser before buying anything online or even booking a hotel through a site such as Hotwire and earning cash back. I don’t buy anything without looking it up on Ebates first then clicking on their link to get a reward on that purchase. You can also stack this on top of the rewards you are earning with any of your cash back cards. One of my cards was paying 2.2x on Travel and I booked with Hotwire with a 8x cash back making it around 10.2x cash back earnings a few months ago.
Steps to get the Ebates Bonus:
1. Join Ebates Here (It’s Free and never any fees)
2. Pick a FREE $10 Gift Card ($10 Walmart, $10 Macy’s, $10 Lowe’s)
3. Make your first $25 dollar purchase to activate the bonus. You could get a gift card from Best Buy, Apple, or Amazon, or the store you shop at the most and will spend money at anyway.
4. Inside your Ebates account click on the Refer-A-Friend button and send out three referrals which could be Facebook friends, Co-workers, neighbors or family members and tell them to pick a $10 gift card and do the $25 purchase requirement for bonus activation. Show them this page here as a reference.
5. When everyone reaches their $25 purchase requirement you should end up with $85 in Bonus Money. Your $10 gift card + Friend 1 $5 (Now $25) bonus + Friend 2 $5 (Now $25) bonus + Friend 3 $5 (Now $25) bonus = $75 Total.
If you have lots of friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Neighbors on Nextdoor, or a big email list you might consider the top bonus payout making you over $20,000.
Chart changes but this was the one used for the last promotion:
1 referrals x $5 + $15 bonus = $20 total
2 referrals x $5 + $35 bonus = $45 total
3 referrals x $5 + $60 bonus = $75 total
10 referrals x $5 + $100 bonus = $150 total
25 referrals x $5 + $275 bonus = $400 total
50 referrals x $5 + $600 bonus = $850 total
100 referrals x $5 + $1,500 bonus = $2,000 total
200 referrals x $5 + $3,000 bonus = $4,000 total
300 referrals x $5 + $4,500 bonus = $6,000 total
400 referrals x $5 + $6,000 bonus = $8,000 total
500 referrals x $5 + $7,500 bonus = $10,000 total
600 referrals x $5 + $9,500 bonus = $12,500 total
700 referrals x $5 + $11,500 bonus = $15,000 total
800 referrals x $5 + $13,500 bonus = $17,500 total
900 referrals x $5 + $15,500 bonus = $20,000 total
1,000 referrals x $5 + $20,000 bonus = $25,000 total
Read our past review on Ebates online shopping portal. There are also other shopping rewards sites such as Swag you may want to join.
