Pennies from Heaven: ShopKick


shopkickDo you love to find unusual ways to earn or save a little extra (money, giftcards, coupons, etc.)?  I have an exciting new(-ish) way to earn giftcards and discounts and I am in love with all the opportunities to work towards my goal: FREE COFFEE!

Shopkick is a FREE app for your smart phone that, well…I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Shopkick is a shopping rewards program that’s, well, more rewarding. No plastic cards, no confusing rules, no extra steps. You just do what you love doing anyway—walking into your favorite stores like Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, Crate&Barrel, Old Navy, Toys”R”Us, Exxon and Mobil convenience stores, and more—and you automatically rack up über-versatile points called “kicks.” No applications to fill out, and no purchase required. That’s right—you just walk in with your smartphone and instantly earn kicks.

 

I go to these places a LOT (ahem…Target obsession!) and have racked up points just for doing what I would normally do (while carrying my phone)!

It really is as easy as they make it sound, but there are many other ways to earn kicks that you can turn in for rewards (Starbucks card, I am coming for you).  The rewards are giftcards to desirable places like the above stated retailers and easily attainable.  They have rewards available at 425 kicks.

Sounds like a great thing, right?  So I thought I would give you a quick run-down on how to make Shopkick work for you:

1.  Do your window shopping with Shopkick from the comfort of your couch.  About once a week, I sit (currently while nursing my little one) and look through ALL the various retailers lookbooks.  It takes about the same amount of time that my little one takes to nurse (20-25 mintues).  So you could do this while waiting for an appointment, while sitting in the pick-up line at school, where ever.  When you look through the lookbooks, you get a number of things:

kicks that just pop up –  As you look through, a bubble with a random number of kicks pops up and the kicks are automatically added to your account.  Sometimes you can get more than one bubble of kicks per lookbook.

bonus kicks – at the end of the first lookbook for a specific retailer, you will unlock bonus kicks that are stored to your account and are awarded to you upon your next visit to that retailer.  NOTE: These kicks usually expire in time, but are available almost every time you log on to shopkick upon looking through another lookbook.

2. Carry your phone with you when you go shopping.  Sounds pretty simple and you probably already do this. But when you have shopkick turned on in your phone, the kicks are automatic once the satellites in space link up and discover your phone is in close proximity to the store.  But you might want to carry your phone with you for another reason:

to locate more kick opportunities nearby – they have a feature on the homepage of the app that allows you to discover the local shops and business where kicks are available

to scan items for more kicks – This is for when you have a little bit more time to spend in store.  You locate specific (very specific) items and scan them with your smart phone’s camera (oh, the technology!).  Once the barcode is recognized, you get kicks!  There are also special groupings of scanable items called missions that require you to scan each item in the group to get the kicks for the individual items and bonus kicks for the group of items.

3. There are a couple more ways to earn more kicks:

Link your credit/debit card to your shopkick account – each time you make a purchase in a participating store, you get more kicks.  This includes Target (did I mention I shop at Target a LOT?)

Invite friends to join shopkick.  They reward you 50% of all the kicks (up to 2500) your friends earn in the first two weeks of using shopkick.  (Yes, that is my referral link! Thanks for the love!)

Bonus kick days – I have noticed especially on holidays, shopkick offers bonus kick days.  Basically these are bonus kicks on steriods.  Where as a normal bonus kick opportunity would be anywhere from 35-55 kicks, these bonus kick days give you up to 200 bonus kicks (again, just for walking into the store, no purchase necessary!)

Get the Best Buy – If you are normally a Best Buy shopper, when you make a purchase in store, give them your phone number and ask them to look it up in the Shopkick system (usually this is done by pressing S after entering the phone number).  You can also have them look up your Best Buy Rewards number this way.  Be sure to do both.  When you do this through shopkick, you get kicks for every dollar you spend at Best Buy.  They can really add up in that store and I have gotten some really big kick paydays when we were already planning on shopping at Best Buy.  And by the way, you can almost always get kicks when you simply walk into Best Buy

Sign in to shopkick on your phone every day and you will get one kick!
Still not convinced? Check out this cool you tube video:

Happy shopping!


This Post Has One Comment

  1. Julia

    Well I’m definitely signing up for this. Thanks for the info!

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