One of the best ways to control your spending and earn extra cashback is by purchasing a gift card for your retailer of choice from a cashback gift card retailer and then using the gift card to pay for your purchase.
This is something I do for making food purchases from my favourite supermarket, and for two reasons:
If I purchase a gift card for the amount I'm expecting/want to pay for my shop, I can then control how much I spend. I find that much in the same way as only having cash in your pocket; if I only have, say, a £100 supermarket gift card with me, I can't spend more than that £100, meaning I then am far more careful on what I purchase and much more likely to really think if I need that product I'm about to put in my basket, and will not go over the budget I've set myself! It's very easy to overspend when using a debit or credit card, as you don't necessarily have the ease of keeping to your budget.
The three leading gift card retailers I buy from offer cashback or a discount on your gift card purchase. The three gift card retailers I use and recommend are:
Karma Cashback
TopCashback
My VIP Rewards Karma Cashback and TopCashback will offer you cashback on your gift card purchase; My VIP Rewards its slightly different as they take the Cashback percentage off the cost of your gift card, so for example, a 5% cashback on a £100 gift card purchase means you would pay £95 for your card with My VIP Rewards or £100 from Karma Cashback and TopCashback but would receive £5 cashback in your cash back account, more or less instantly, which you can either spend or withdraw, depending on your preference.
I'm often asked which gift card cashback site is best, and actually, that's very hard to answer as they all offer something different. Let's look at the cashback rates of the three gift card websites I've mentioned and compare the cashback rates on supermarket gift cards, as these are, in my opinion, the best gift cards to purchase, purely because it's pretty unusual for anyone to not make a reasonably regular purchase from a supermarket, as we all have to eat, so it gives the most likely way to earn the most cashback.
Below is a comparison chart of the three cashback sites and the main supermarkets you can buy gift cards from in return for some form of cashback.
As the chart shows, not every cashback site offers gift cards for every supermarket.
So going by the chart (which was correct as of 18th September 2022, but subject to change/promotion), the better cashback rates are from My VIP Rewards. However, this isn't a free-to-use Cashback site; you need to buy a subscription to the site to get the better cashback rates, so it's a bit of an initial investment to reap potentially higher rewards later.
Therefore assuming you don't want to purchase a subscription to My VIP Rewards (I'll talk about that again in a minute), the next best choice is Karma Cashback which easily beats TopCashback in both cashback percentage rates and the variety of supermarkets that gift cards can be purchases for.
It's quite a surprising result, as TopCashback is the more extensive cashback service. Still, it seems they aren't as competitive on gift card purchases, but they offer the broadest range of conventional cashback retailers, which is still more than its nearest rival, Quidco.
The nice thing about supermarket gift cards is that you can also use them at supermarket petrol stations. So if you buy your fuel at a supermarket petrol station, you can purchase a gift card you can use to pay for fuel, and this can add up a being how expensive fuel is currently! I have a larger vehicle, and I always add £100 of fuel when I fill up. I buy a Morrisons gift card for £100 from Karma Cashback, which gives me 2.8% cashback, or £2.80 every time I fill up, which is often twice a month, and so that's over £67 a year in cashback, just for my fuel purchases, never mind the food cashback as well, or the equivalent of over half a tank of fuel for me, and the more cars you have, the more savings you can make!
Regarding the subscription cashback site, MY Vip Rewards, you can grab a free month using code LOVESAVING1 to try it out. Also, they have a promo to grab a year's subscription for £15.00 (I haven't found an end date for that), and that promo code is CHRISTMASSAVER You can sign up and use the promo codes HERE.
TopCashback is free to join, and the gift cards can be found on the website and app under the Top Giftcards section. If you haven't joined already, you can sign up HERE using our referral link, which will give you a £10 bonus once you have earned £10 of cashback.
Karma Cashback is also free to sign up for; you can download the app and register via this LINK. Keep your eyes peeled for emails from Karma Cashback, as they offer some really good special deals that can really save you money on food and other retail purchases.