Yes, Rakuten will give you $10 absolutely for free. If you haven’t heard of Rakuten before, perhaps you’ve heard of Ebates? In fact, it’s the same company. Ebates simply changed their name to Rakuten, and they’re offering $10 for new members. Read on to find out.
What is Rakuten?
Rakuten is a company that provides a service to both you, the consumer, and retail merchants. They offer the retail merchant increased sales due to constantly referring new members towards these products. For the consumer, they offer cash back on their purchases.
Raktuen has partnered with over 2500 stores, both physical stores and online merchants. As part of this agreement with the retail merchants, the stores provide Rakuten with an unknown percentage of cash back. Rakuten then splits that cash back with its members.
For example, Rakuten is currently offering 1% cash back on purchases made at eBay. Some of their cash back offers range from .5% – 30%. These fluctuate and change over time.
What Does it Mean for You?
Really, it’s very simple. Many of us shop online these days. If you sign up for a Rakuten account, you just have to do one little step before your next purchase. Let me outline the process for you.
I do a lot of shopping on eBay, so we’ll use that as an example. I purchase a lot of business goods and parts on eBay as a way of supporting the community that helps me profit. A good estimate would be that I spend around $200 a month on eBay for business. So, first of all, I need to sign up with a Rakuten account.
If you don’t have an account, you can sign up with this link here. Signing up through my link will get you your free $10 bonus. All you need to do is complete a valid $25 order. I can’t stress this enough; it does not cost you one extra cent.
Now that we’ve established our Rakuten account, we can search for vendors via the Rakuten website, smartphone app, or even using the Chrome extension. I use the app most of the time, so I would just search for “eBay” as the vendor I’d like.
From there, I can see that Rakuten is rewarding me with 1% cash back. I click on “got it,” and it takes me over to the normal eBay page. Everything from here on out is the same as it normally is, except I get credited with 1% cash back.
So, in terms of our example, if I spend $200 a month on eBay for business expenses, that 1% cash back would equate to $2 a month, or $24 a year. Now, you might be thinking “that’s not worth it,” but if you found a $20 bill on the side of the road would you think it was worth it to pick it up? That’s essentially the same thing; we’re not doing anything extra and we’re earning back some of the money that we’re spending.
Now, again, eBay is perhaps not a good example. We also buy our dog food through Chewy, and they’re currently offering 3% cash back through Rakuten. So you can see how if you purchase a lot of things from online retailers, this can really add up.
In the next few posts in this series, I want to talk about some of Rakuten’s competitors as well as other cash back services that I have been employing. I’m actually super excited to share a “triple-threat” cash back plan that maximizes my returns. Stay tuned for that!