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Are you looking for apps like Shopkick for even more ways to earn money from your phone?
In case you don’t know, Shopkick is a smartphone app that awards you points for checking in at stores and scanning products.
The work required is very minimal and you can earn gift cards to popular retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy.
Instead of just scanning your shopping receipts, it offers more money earning opportunities such as entering stores, scanning barcodes of products and using their special coupons.
Let’s say you have every cash-back shopping app that Frugal for Less has recommended, but you want something different, something more physical to accomplish.
Here are 11 money-earning apps like Shopkick:
Table of Contents
1. Drop
Drop is a cash-back app, but you don’t have to do any work!
There’s no receipt scanning, no extra effort is needed except connecting your credit and debit cards to the app and going ahead with your usual shopping.
Drop works by using your connected cards at certain stores, you earn varying amounts of cash back. Other bonus opportunities for additional earnings include a $1 signup bonus, a $1 bonus for every friend you refer, a bonus for linking your first card, a bonus for following their social media pages, a bonus for making your first purchase, and even a bonus for confirming your e-mail address, and many more.
How many points you can earn depends on the retailer, but once you’ve earned 5,000 points ($5 USD) you can redeem them for gift cards. Drop claims their members earn their first card within a month of downloading the app.
2. Acorns
Want to earn money with your all your purchases, but don’t want to bother with shopping apps, hunting for specific locations to check-in, or mystery shop? Then Acorns may be suitable for you.
Sign up and get $5, connect all your credit cards and debit cards and set how much you want each shopping receipt to be rounded up to and that’s it.
Let’s say you set the app to round up every purchase to the nearest dollar. You bought groceries for $25.45, Acorns automatically rounds it up and deposits 55¢. When your money from rounding up across your linked accounts reach at least $5, Acorns transfers that amount to an investment account to grow some more.
Acorns also has investment accounts, retirement accounts, a debit card, and other means of making money as well.
3. ShopTracker
I know the two names can get mixed up, I’ve accidentally called it Shopkicker a few times, but ShopTracker is specifically for Amazon shopping.
All you need to do is download the app, connect your Amazon accounts, leave it running, and shop as usual. You earn $3 a month per Amazon account – for a total of $36 a year of free money. All for just shopping on Amazon, which many of us do regularly.
4. Nielson Computer & Mobile Panel
Another app where you don’t have to do anything except download the app. Nielson Computer & Mobile Panel tracks your searches, shopping, and everything you do online.
Download the app on every smartphone, tablet, and computer you have for more earning potential. You can earn about $50 a year for each device you have the program running on it.
5. Perk
Perk has a huge variety of apps to earn money and points, but today its about the original Perk app. Perk lets you explore any city or town to find places where you can earn Perk Points.
The app has a map to show all the locations around you where you can earn, such as getting 25 points for checking into the nearest “The Gap” store, 15 points for checking into the Walmart, and earn bonus points for checking out a promotional offer, a survey or watching a video.
These points can be converted into gift cards, entered into sweepstakes, or Perk Plastik, their prepaid debit card. The minimum points you’ll need are 9,000 points for a PayPal cash deposit or 1,250 points for a $1 Amazon gift card and up.
6. Trunow
Instead of getting money back on your shopping trips, why not get money back on all your gasoline purchases?
Trunow gives you 1% cash back for each gas receipt you scan, plus 2% towards their rewards program. You start with a $2 bonus for signing up and scanning your first receipt as well as chances to enter for reward prizes.
It has a map to show the closest gas station, bonus offers in-store, and even where the cheapest prices are.
7. MobiSave
This is actually a grocery receipt scanning app, but the bonus is that it’s product specific, not store specific.
Using the MobiSave app, you simply find products you’ve bought, scan the receipt that lists those products and get cash-back.
The offers change from week to week, and once in a while there’ll be items that branch outside of groceries. The amount you can earn per offer ranges anywhere from 25¢ to $3 and it doesn’t matter what store you buy it from. For example, buying Reynolds Foil from either Walmart or Target still gets 75¢ in cash back.
8. Paribus
Paribus is a cash-back platform in a different way – it tracks your receipts through your emails, track their prices and if there are any sales or lowered prices, it will notify you.
All you have to do is sign-up, enter in your shopping accounts, save your online shopping receipts, and wait for notifications. Joining is free, but if you receive some cash back through Paribus, they take a 25% commission.
For example, you bought a new 14” Chrome Notebook for $299, but 2 weeks later the price was lowered to $269. Paribus notifies you, you give the go-ahead to get your credit back. You’ll then receive $22.50 and Paribus keeps $7.50.
It may not seem like much, but did you know that Amazon prices fluctuates so much that a price-checking company has to check them 3 – 4 times a day?
9. Receipt Hog
Yes, Receipt Hog is a grocery scanning app, but with a big difference than the usual shopping portal apps.
Instead of having to go through the app, picking out the specific offers you want and then shopping for them, Receipt Hog accepts any receipt from any store – as long as the product matches their list. You earn about 10 – 20 coins per receipt, depending on your receipt’s total. The minimum payout you need is 1,000 coins for a $5 via PayPal.
There are other ways to earn coins on this app, including mini slots (earn 1 spin per receipt) to win up to $100, drawings for “random receipt of the day”, surveys, tasks to complete, and referring friends (10 free spins on the slots).
This is a pretty easy way to earn as it only takes 30 seconds to upload a receipt. If you have a lot of receipts, referrals and slot coins, it’s possible to make around $12 an hour.
10. Jobs2Shop
This is a bit different than a shopping portal – Jobs2Shop pays users to complete surveys, do some mystery shopping tasks, and more.
Let’s start with a $5 sign-up bonus, you automatically get a 3-minute survey to fill out to receive $1.50, and $5 for every referral. Then there’s 50¢ per email read and up to 25¢ per game played.
The bulk of your earnings are from mystery shopping, product evaluations, and surveys. Mystery shopping reimburses you your store purchases plus extra depending on the product bought, product evaluations pay up to $85, and surveys up to $2 each.
11. Mobee
Mobee is a mystery shopping app where you get paid to eat out, take online surveys related to places you’re at, or even for going shopping.
Once you’re a member, you receive “missions” to complete whenever you enter a store. These are simply 5 to 10 questions to answer about your location, once completed you earn points towards cash, gift cards, and prizes.
Once you’re at a location, the app will show any available mission and the number of points you’ll receive upon completion, the average is about 250 to 750 points a mission. 100 points equal $1 USD, you need a minimum of 350 points to be able to redeem them.
Since each mission is only 5 to 10 minutes long at about 250-750 points, it’s possible to make about $6 to $12 an hour.
Conclusion
Now you have 11 different apps that you can make money by shopping, without the extensive hunting for specific offers and items and going through the specific app itself.
Some of these don’t require any work at all which is great – free money!
The best earning opportunity is to combine these apps with all your shopping apps for even more potential. Use the same receipt to scan into several different programs for top earnings.
Let’s say you went shopping at Walmart through Ibotta, you got $3 cash back, but you also earned more:
- Got 75¢ back on Walmart’s Savings Catcher
- Got 10 coins and a free spin Receipt Hog
- Got 50¢ back on MobiSave
- Got 1,000 points on Drop
- Got 35¢ transferred to savings from Acorns.
That one receipt got you at least $4.60 cash back. Not counting the points and bonuses for check-ins, mystery shopping, and other earning opportunities.
If you want to add more cash-back portals, check out the top 10 apps that pay you to scan grocery receipts.
