Wal-Mart, you might not like it you might not even go there regularly but if you ever walk into a Wal-Mart you need to use the Savings Catcher.
Wal-Mart usually does a good job at catching price differences and marking down the items to match their competition. There are times though when you are missing out on lower prices. To combat this Wal-Mart has the Savings Catcher, which is a free app & website where you submit your Wal-Mart receipts and they cross compare prices locally. If they find a product that you purchased at Wal-Mart cheaper elsewhere, you will receive the difference in the form of a gift card.
This can lead to some very interesting money-saving situations that I am going to go into below. Both Ebates, & Drop offer cash back for Wal-Mart & you might not know if there is a Wal-Mart Credit card (albeit a standard American Express or Discover card would be sufficient).
We are going to make some general assumptions, for the simplicity of math. We are going to assume you have a cash back credit card, I am going to say you get 3% cash back for shopping at Wal-Mart.
Then, we are going to assume you are also making use of the Drop app which sadly only offers 2 points per dollar at Wal-Mart, we will not be factoring in Ebates because the savings catcher only applies to in-store purchases and Ebates does not have Wal-Mart for in-store cash back yet.
So you purchase $100 at Wal-Mart you will get about $.20 from Drop and $3 with your credit card’s cash back. Effectively reducing the bill to $96.80, which while not bad if you use the Savings Catcher, it will cross compare the pricing. So if you bought a $25 pair of jeans and they found the same thing listed for $15 on their own website you just got $10 back.
The point of utilizing the Savings Catcher is you get money back but your original purchase amount will be unchanged, but this also means when you combine other benefits Coupons, Credit Cards, Drop, etc you get that cash back regardless with the savings catcher. Additionally, since your original purchase price does not decrease you are awarded, with a higher point and cash back value than if the price was just subtracted at checkout.
To make it easier to understand in that above example the savings catcher saved you $10 on a pair of paints your credit card company still awarded you cash back at the $100 value, as did Drop. This is different from say using a store card like Target Red Card and you get 5% off at purchase, which reduces your rewards from other apps.
All that this means if you shop at Wal-Mart use the Savings Catcher with other cash back systems such as Drop & Ebates to maximize your savings potential.