Topic: Before you do your Black Friday shopping...

[MegaByte]

I'd suggest signing up for a few services.

For online shopping, the first is Ebates. The way Ebates works is you find the site where you want to shop for a referral link. Once you make a purchase, you're credited back a certain percentage back, and Ebates will cut you a check every three months. They've just bumped up a bunch of their percentages, and some are as high as 10%, which can be pretty significant, especially if you're buying a bunch of games. They're summarily higher than all of the credit card referrals that I've seen. It sounds too good to be true, but I can confirm that they are actually legit. I've gotten payments, and they're owned by the same people as Fatwallet.

For in-store shopping, there's Shopkick. With this one, you can check into certain retail stores to gain points, and you can link up your credit cards to gain more points. You can also scan various product barcodes to get more points. You can cash out the points for digital gift cards. Some stores also post special coupons through the app. It's not as rewarding as Ebates, but it's good if you need to kill time while shopping.

There's also Shop Your Way Rewards, which works at the Sears and Kmart group of stores, both online and offline. Basically, you earn at least 1% in points for each purchase. But the nice thing is that you can cash those points out at any time, just credit them against your order in conjunction with any other coupons (and stacked with Ebates). They also have a bunch of coupons that you can add to your account that can sometimes be pretty significant. I also get relatively frequent coupon e-mails from them where I can just go to the store and pick up something like a piece of clothing for free (no wonder their business is failing...).

Yes, I'd appreciate if you'd use the referral links above so I get credit, but it's up to you. Know of any other good deals that we can use in conjunction with regular Black Friday deals?