Maximising Value: How to Find the Best Online Deals

With so many vendors battling to win you over, it can be cumbersome trying to find the offers, deals, bonuses, and reward programs that are actually the best for you. All of them will be a little bit different, so having a clear-cut way to home in on the deals that will bring you maximum value can help a lot. After putting in the legwork to find your best options, everything becomes much more streamlined as you reap the rewards for your online purchases.

Here, we’ll be exploring a bunch of the best ways to find online deals and get great rewards. From getting cashback for your shops to collecting some freebies, this is how you can maximize value online in Canada.

Getting Cashback for Online Payments

Source: Unsplash

Getting cash back for buying your products and services via certain platforms and vendors is a clear-cut way to find the best deals. While the cashback tends to take several weeks or months to come back, after using the services regularly for a while, you’ll begin to get a steady flow of cash in return. One option is moneygenius.ca. They specialize in giving cashback for opening certain online checking accounts, saving accounts, taking loans, and making a will.

Following their cashback plan for financial services, you can get a bonus stack of $250 in cashback. So, while the ongoing chance to get cashback on purchases is the big promotion, you can also get a bonus for joining. It’s a formula for attracting new customers that mirrors that certain online entertainment platforms in Canada, which continually jostle for position with better welcome offers and improved follow-up loyalty programs.

The welcome bonus is standardized in online casino gaming to the point that platforms are ranked by the value of these bonuses. The reviews and rankings site bonus.ca assesses these bonuses and forms partnerships with the sites to give their users access to exclusive bonuses, enabling would-be players to quickly find the ones that offer maximum value. Some have free spins with several deposit matches with 35x wagering requirements, while others give 20 no-deposit free spins followed by free spins and a deposit match.

Some of the best cashback services don’t always offer a welcome bonus or enhanced cashback bonus to new customers, but are still worth considering. Originally from the UK, topcashback.com has swiftly established itself as an easy way to find, buy, and get cashback on a huge range of products in Canada. Expedia, Adidas, Walmart, eBay, and Crocs are among those online stores you can get cashback at if you go to them via their platform. Many of the offers that filter through here are exclusive to users of topcashback.com.

Funnelling it All Through the Right Credit Cards

All of the major card providers want you to use their credit cards to collect up all of those interest payments. So, picking the ones that also offer an avenue to cashback and additional rewards is a no-brainer. Take the Scotia Momentum Visa Infinite Card. It charges interest rates of up to 22.99 percent. However, the rate of rewards comes at up to four percent for every dollar spent and the intro offer goes up to $200. There is a $120 annual fee, but that’s waived for the first year, making it a strong choice for everyday use, as nerdwallet.com details.

If there isn’t cashback on offer by the credit card, there’ll probably be a points system. The MBNA Rewards World Elite Mastercard has opted for this setup. They offer five points for each dollar spent on household utility bills, groceries, memberships, restaurants, and digital media services that fall under their scheme. Those points can then be converted into money off of future purchases. For example, 100 points will get $1 off of a travel purchase. All you need to do is use the credit card for your purchases and watch the rewards roll in.

Collecting Those Loyalty Accounts

Source: Pexels

You may want to keep a little note on your smartphone to keep track of all of your logins and details, but there are so many loyalty and bonus programs available at Canada’s favourite vendors. For the most part, all you need to do is create an account online, and you’ll be good to go. They may even send you a loyalty card in the post for when you happen to visit a brick-and-mortar store or restaurant. Among the headliners for these are two of Canada’s biggest quick-stop restaurants, a major hotel chain, and, of course, airlines.

Seeing Tim Hortons gobble up the Canadian market, McDonald’s sought to try to level the playing field. Tims Rewards offers a strong rate of return on purchases across their many avenues for earning points. As the timhortons.ca website shows, you get 1,100 points for breakfast sandwiches, 400 for brewed coffee, and even 1,800 points for flatbread pizzas. Those points convert to being worth roughly 0.66 cents each. McDonald’s Rewards is how the American giant seeks to compete, offering a scheme that actually returns at a better rate.

For hotel rewards, few loyalty programs are as rewarding as Marriott Bonvoy. Each point earned is worth nearly a whole dollar, and there are plenty of Marriott hotels dotted around the world to make the most of its scheme. Plus, they have their own American Express card, which you can get even more points from with purchases on-site and beyond. Among the many airline options, one of your best loyalty schemes to tap into when booking flights online is WestJet Rewards. Each point is worth $1 and you can get 450 WestJet dollars as a welcome bonus.

Finding Samples and Freebies Online

It’s always nice to stumble onto a new online-based service or store and see that they’ll let you try them out for free. Most of the online meal delivery services offer a form of free starter box, and you can always find free trials for online entertainment platforms or free demos for specific products, like with computer games. Still, these aren’t always available where you want to shop or for the products that you want. Going website to website to try to find these is incredibly cumbersome.

To help with this, a couple of trusted Canadian platforms have come up with ways to collect up all of the online free samples available – and sometimes get some exclusive ones through – and put them all in one place. With samplesource.com, you register an account, pick which samples you want to try, and then they deliver them to you. It’s completely free, and you get to share your feedback on the products through the site.

At freecanadasamples.com, the methods for getting free stuff are assembled onto their platform. Lots of companies out there will offer customers a way to get free stuff if they complete surveys or join research platforms. So, the free samples site puts them all into one place to make them easier to find and even rank and categorise the offers by their categories. If you want free food, books, or baby stuff, they’ve got the top current offers ready for your clicks.

There are stacks of online deals, bonuses, and promotions for Canadians to find. For the best stuff, the best rates of return, and the best places to view all of your options with ease, check out the sites we delved into above!