Mypoints.com A Great Way to Earn Rewards Just for Shopping

A few weeks ago, I spent $150 on a grill at target.com. Today, I received a $10 Wal-mart gift card as part of that purchase.

For those of you scratching your heads wondering how something like that could be part of the deal, it's obvious you haven't discovered mypoints.com.

With mypoints.com, I can make my normal online purchase and, just by visiting their site first, will earn points that can be used to redeem gift cards to plenty of retailers and restaurants. It's a process that takes an extra minute or two but pays huge rewards.

Mypoints.com lists hundreds of online sellers you can buy from. Most of these are sites the average consumer would visit; Target, Kmart, Overstock.com, eBay, and Avon to name a few. Registration to the site is free and, depending on the company you buy from, you can earn quite a few points in a short amount of time.

A purchase from Target.com, for example, will earn you 5 points for every dollar spent and 10 points per dollar on orders over $65. My purchase of the grill earned me 1,500 points; just enough to be redeemed for a $10 Wal-mart gift card.

A purchase through eBay will give you 100 points up front and 2 points for every dollar spent and Avon will give you 3 points per dollar spent. Barnes & Noble offers 10 points per dollar. The points are usually added to your total a couple weeks after making the purchase (probably to allow for payment to clear and to make sure you're not returning the item right away).

In addition to earning points by shopping, mypoints.com gives its members several opportunities to earn extra points; usually on a daily basis. Throughout my average week day, I receive several "bonus" e-mails from mypoints.com that offer me 5 points simply for reading the enclosed advertisement; regardless of whether I accept the offer or not. I can earn as many as 50 points for taking the occasional survey and another 5-10 points for the polls they will sometimes put up on their site. In fact, the first gift card I ever redeemed from mypoints.com (a $10 gift card for Pizza Hut) was earned without me buying one item online. However, it does take a bit longer to do this.