Shop Your Way Rewards Archives

Awesome Deal Alert! Get 12 American AAdvantage Miles per $ spent at Sears through October 12.

I guess Sears has opened up their marketing budget because another great offer for miles has come up, this time with American Airlines AAdvantage Shopping Portal. This deal for 12 Miles per dollar through 10/12/13 is pretty much identical to the United one from two days ago so rather than cutting and pasting everything I would suggest you just read that deal for the details. Here is a summary though if you have never done this before and want to get started earning boatloads of miles!

What to do if you have never done anything with Sears, American Airlines, or Plink before?

If you want to get started here are the steps to take.

Sign up for a free American Airlines AAdvantage frequent flyer account. This is the account you will get the miles deposited to.
Log into your AAdvantage Shopping account using the frequent flyer number and password you just created.
Sign up for a free Plink account. Add Sears and KMart to your “wallet” once you have your account set up and download the mobile Plink app.
Sign up with Shop Your Way Rewards to get an extra 1% back to use at Sears or K-Mart. This link will sign you up with me as your personal shopper and I will get 1% too!
Click on the Sears link from AAdvantage Shopping which will take you to Sears’ web site.
Start with just one $50 physical gift card purchase if you want so you can see how the process works. Make multiple $50 orders if you want more miles. Make sure to use the credit or debit card you registered with Plink.
When you receive the gift card, go back through AAdvantage Shopping again and buy something you need at Sears (they sell a ton of stuff).
Then next time you will have all the accounts set up so you can swing for the fences and get a ton of miles!

Feel free to comment on this post if you have any questions and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter!

Awesome Deal Alert! 12-16X Miles at Sears via United Mileageplus Shopping

Sears occasionally has some awesome promotions such as when I made 264,000 Ultimate Rewards points and $1000 with Sears and when I received 189,000 Southwest points and the companion pass via online shopping. This is one of those times!

For today and tomorrow you can get 12 United Miles per $ that you spend on Sears.com. If you have the United Explorer card, the rate goes up to an amazing 16 Miles per $! Now even though the terms and conditions say gift cards don’t apply, in my experience as long as you order the physical gift cards the miles will still be awarded. Read this recent post of ours about maximizing sears purchases by quadruple dipping using Plink for bonus points you can redeem for giftcards.

The way to maximize this is to buy the physical gift cards today using a Plink optimized amount of $50 per gift card. Since the gift cards purchased at Sears are issued by KMart (they have the same parent company), you will need to have KMart in your Plink wallet. By the way I get 100 Plink points (worth $1!) if you sign up for Plink using this link 🙂 so thanks!

So an overview of how this would work if you wanted to get $1000 of gift cards would be.

Buy twenty $50 gift cards in separate transactions each time starting at the Mileage Plus Shopping Portal
For each purchase, you would get 12X$50 = 600 united miles and 300 Plink points.
So if you bought 20 gift cards you would get 12,000 United Miles and 6,000 Plink points (worth $60 in gift cards).
This is in addition to whatever miles or points you would get from the credit card you use.
Once you get the gift cards you can go back through the shopping portal again and will get more miles when you use the cards for merchandise!

So what to do with the gift cards if you don’t actually need anything from Sears? What I do is buy and sell tablet PCs. I can usually buy and sell them for about the same amount. I have had really good luck with the new Nexus 7 model from Asus.

Read this post for an example of how I bought and sold tablets without losing much and scored a bunch of miles!. Once you buy and sell enough with Sears you can become a Platinum member in their Shop Your Way Rewards program and get an extra 15% if you buy on the right days.

What to do if you have never done anything before?

If you want to get started here are the steps to take.

Sign up for a free United Mileage Plus frequent flyer account. This is the account you will get the miles deposited to.
Log into your Mileage Plus Shopping account using the frequent flyer number and PIN you just created.
Sign up for a free Plink account. Add Sears and KMart to your “wallet” once you have your account set up and download their mobile app.
Then follow the guidance above to get started. Start with just one $50 purchase if you want so you can see how the process works and buy something you need at Sears (they sell a ton of stuff). Then next time you will have all the accounts set up so you can swing for the fences and get a ton of miles!

Feel free to comment on this post if you have any questions and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter!

Quadruple Dipping at Sears for up to 47% off everything, even sale stuff!

Warning: This is an advanced post, but don’t be scared! Just try to understand it step by step. The savings are worth the trouble!

A unique opportunity has presented itself for the next few days that I wanted to share with you. By combining the following, you can save up 31-45% off every single thing that Sears sells:

Plink is having a sale until August 25, where for every $50 you spend at K-Mart, you get 600 Plink points which can be redeemed for $6 in Amazon.com gift certificates (or others). Sears.com gift card purchases get billed as K-Mart which works for this special. I have used this site for the past few months and it has been reliable.
AAdvantage Shopping through August 17, 2013 is offering 9 AAdvantage miles per dollar spent which also works if you order physical gift cards.
Once you get the gift cards, if you have a Discover It® Card (like the Discover It card we told you about last week), you can go back to Sears using the ShopDiscover Portal and get 10% cashback.
You can get an additional 1-15% by signing up for sears Shop Your Way Rewards and shopping on the right day. You can get 1% all the time, but if you are a VIP you can get up to 15% on one day a quarter.

For those people who aren’t really into this it might seem a bit confusing so here is an example.

Start at AAdvantageshopping.com and use the credit card you have registered with Plink to buy a $50 physical gift card. You will get $50*9=450 AAdvantage Miles and 600 Plink points.

Then log into your ShopDiscover account and click back through to Sears to earn 10% on whatever you buy. Assuming you buy something that is $50, you will get another $5 from Discover. By putting your shopyourwayrewards number in when you purchase, you will get another 1%-15% depending on your VIP level.

So for every $50 gift card you buy, you will end up with:

450 AAdvantage miles (worth at least $5)
600 Plink points (worth $6)
$5 in Discover cashback
1%-15% in ShopYourWayRewards points.

This adds up to 32-47% off anything Sears sells!

So if you wanted to buy a $1000 TV, you could buy twenty $50 gift cards in separate transactions and end up with 9000 AAdvantage miles, $120 worth of Plink Points, $100 in Discover Cashback, and $10-$150 in ShopYourWayRewards points.

Awesome, huh? Act fact though because this perfect storm only lasts until tomorrow. You can replace Step 2 with the cashback from Discover though until August 25th if you would rather have cash than AAdvantage miles.

Feel free to comment if you have any questions and I will try to answer them!

How I bought a 70″ TV for $515 the Travel With Miles way!!

I am always shopping for deals, both for things I want and things to buy and resell. I had had my eye on a 70″ Sharp TV ever since I saw the monster in a Sears store. But I am never one to pay retail and would rather not buy something than overpay. I was really happy with the deal I recently worked out, and while it doesn’t involve earning tons of miles per se, I think it will show some of the ways I save money every day on big purchases.

First off, this TV has a retail price of $2,799 which would normally be much more than I want to pay. Here is a review of the TV I ended up getting. The cheapest price I had seen online was around $1600 at the time. As many of you know, I love shopping at Sears (like I did when I got 264,000 Ultimate Rewards points and $1000 by shopping and then reselling tablets). They frequently have Shop Your Way promotions that add a lot of value to things bought there and decrease my effective cost.

One of the lesser known secrets is to shop for things on SearsOutlet.com. Most of the products on this site are brand new and are last year’s model they are closing out or they also get rid of their floor models there. I had been checking in every once in a while doing a search for “70 LED” and seeing what the prices were. There are often times some real steals on bigger TVs there. The problem is with the floor models you have to pick them up from whichever store has them. I saw a great price once of around $1000, but it was in Hawaii and while I would love to go, coming back with a TV would be problematic. 🙂

Since I have bought and sold so many tablets for resale on my Amazon.com store, I have platinum status with Shop Your Way Rewards. This makes me eligible to get 15% back in Shop Your Way Reward points on one day each quarter, but sometimes more than one day. So if I buy $1000 worth of goods then they give me $150 in points to use for a future purchase. In fact I still had $407 worth of these points (407,000) saved up from previous purchases of tablets for resale. They happened to be having one of these special 15% back days on April 9th so I went to the Sears Outlet page and lo and behold they had this 70″ TV in Ft. Myers which is about 2 hours from where I live. I also had some friends in Naples I could visit if I could work out a deal.

The price was $1193 which wasn’t the lowest price I had seen but it was the lowest I had seen in Florida. It showed on the site it was a floor model and didn’t have any missing parts or damages, but I called the store and got transferred to the TV department and asked for the condition before I bought it. They said they had two of them and they could give me the one in better shape if I bought it. $1193 was a good price but I couldn’t stop my deal there.

I searched around online for a “SearsOutlet Coupon Code” and I found a code for 10% off that was valid. Score! This would save me $119. But I wasn’t done yet. Since I was buying it on the Shop Your Way Cyber bonus days, I got 15% back for $157 worth of points.

I ALWAYS look for miles or cashback offers by using a shopping portal online. For you new guys, a shopping portal just means you log onto an account then go to their online shopping mall. I searched for SearsOutlet on both Cashbackholic.com and evreward.com and found out that I could get 5% cash back if I used the UPromise.com shopping portal. This was more valuable to me than the 3 miles per dollar I could get on American.

I could have used gift cards to sweeten the deal even more, but I wanted to put the main charge of $732.58 on my Business Gold Rewards American Express so I would add 1 free year onto the warranty at no cost. When I buy for resale, I don’t mind using gift cards because I don’t care about the warranty so much since I won’t be keeping it. But since this was personal, I wanted the extra protection (which gave me added safety since it was a floor model.) I also got 732 Membership Rewards for spending $732 on my Amex!

So the grand total ended up being:

Retail price: $2,799
Sales Price: $1193.93
Sales Tax: $64.47
10% discount for coupon: -$119.39
15% in Shop Your Way Rewards Points: -$157.17
5% in UPromise Cashback: -$59.70
Redeemed 406,430 Shop Your Way Rewards Points: -$406.43
Net cost: $515.71 and I received 732 Membership Rewards points.

Now that’s what I call a deal! I am planning on selling my old TV for at least that much so I effectively ended up with a larger TV for very little if any out of pocket!

I hope this gives you guys some ideas on ways to purchase things and teaches you a thing or two. Feel free to comment with your deals that you are proud of!