Tech
Black Friday deal tip: Activate your credit card’s cashback offers!
Everyone loves a good deal. But a lot of people sleep on cashback offers from their banks.
Yep, banks will credit your statements for your shopping, based on purchases made with your credit or debit card. The catch: You have to active these offers first.
So during Black Friday, it can literally pay to log into your bank account and look at what offers are available to you. I set a reminder every November to harass my friends and family about looking at theirs.
Why? Well, one of them just activated an offer for $100 off a $500+ purchase at Dell. And they were about to buy a new laptop there.
How to activate merchant offers
These cashback deals can be found in your bank account’s main dashboard or in your card’s individual dashboard. They usually span multiple categories like shopping, entertainment (including streaming services), cell phone services, restaurants, travel, etc. Sometimes it’s a percentage, other times it’s a fixed amount. Minimum spend amounts may be required, too.
A few tips:
- Activate the offer first before shopping! These are not retroactively awarded.
- Not sure you activated an offer? You can filter the list to see which ones you’re enrolled in.
- Have multiple cards? Check your offers for each—they might be different, even if they’re both with the same bank.
- Make note of the expiration date for the offers.
CBS / PCWorld
How to ultra-combo with other offers
Fun fact: Merchant offers are different than cashback or reward portals (e.g., Rakuten, Capital One Shopping).
So sometimes you can combine a store discount, a merchant offer active on your credit or debit card, and a cashback portal rebate.
For example, right now a deal at Visible (a subsidiary of Verizon with cheaper prepaid cell phone plans) cuts the price of their annual top-tier plan (Visible+ Pro) in half. Normally $450, it’s down to $225, or $18.75 per month.
Then, if you have an American Express or Chase credit card, you can stack on a merchant offer of either $30 or $15 cashback (respectively) as well.
And finally, if you use Rakuten’s cashback portal, you’re eligible to earn $40. Or, if you instead go through Capital One Shopping and visit the website a few times, you could get an offer for $120 in rewards, which can be redeemed for a gift card (available stores vary).
The maximum cashback savings? That would be $155, or $12.92 per month for unlimited text/talk/data, 100GB hotspot data, and free data for a smartwatch.
I’m not in the market for this plan, but boy, this kind of discount and cashback chaining is simply beautiful.
