$50 max cashback per transaction. 7 transactions per month.
Good timing on 20% as 2019 Prum are back. for me, anyway.
App not needed - and thanks for the heads-up!
Solid first post!
How did you get them for $25 per?
Can you use $50 off 150 coupon for purchase, then use another 50 off 150 coupon for same wine, same day? If so, how many times can this be done?
Sorry if this has been covered already…I don’t really follow what’s going on with all these code things! ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
As long as they are different coupons, I think you can use as many as you want. I used 3 coupons on 3 separate transactions a couple days ago.
You can get the albe barolo for $19 (50% off) if you read some of the tips above in this thread. The short version is combine 33% off promo codes with 20% cash back from retailmenot and 6% cash back using gift cards from raise.com.
Buzz, here’s the (I hope) short-ish version of the tutorial (trying to answer FAQ), though as indicated there are various tips spread throughout this thread:
First, most of these places use referral programs where you can get a one-time offer and the person referring you can get a bonus. If you don’t already have an account at these places, please don’t sign up for one without using a referral. I’ll put some of mine in this post, Jin has some of his in the first post on page one, and other helpful contributors have theirs spread throughout the thread. If you use one of mine for one site, first - thank you, but second - please use someone else’s for one of the other sites - spread the love!
Second, you’ll want to set up an account at wine.com and retailmenot.com at a minimum, but also raise.com and rakuten.com (and/or topcashback.com) if you really want to maximize. Basically, you buy the wine at wine.com using one of their coupon codes, but you first log in to a "portal’ site (either retailmennot or rakuten or topcashback - but only one of them) to get an additional rebate, and use gift cards purchased at raise to pay for the wine. As an example, a coupon can get you $50 off of $150 at wine.com, but if you start at retailmenot during one of their periodic 20% offers, you get 20% of your net spend back, and if you use raise you pay with gift cards you can get at approx. 92 cents on the dollar all-in. So the saving stack up nicely, and this is how you end up with things like the Albe for so cheap.* TopCashback, Rakuten, and RetailMeNot each do the same thing and you can only use one of them on any given purchase. Rakuten can offer a higher rebate than RMN on any given day, but Rakuten can get finicky about paying the rebate if also use a coupon code not on their list, and Rakuten has never gone to 20%. TopCashback is higher than Rakuten on “normal” days and they will match Rakuten (but not RMN) when Rakuten has a special higher offer - they also seem to be less finicky than Rakuten about using non-listed coupon codes, but the jury is still out on that. The RMN 20% days are the gold standard. They seem to come around most months for a few days and then disappear until next time, whenever that may be (they don’t tell you in advance when they will be). When they come around, don’t dawdle as they will pull the offer once a certain volume has gone through even if it otherwise says that the offer will be good through a certain date.
- As an example on the Albe, if you go whole hog and use a 2% cash-back credit card and Rakuten’s standard 1% cash back offer for raise.com to go to that site and buy gift cards at 6% off, then use those to buy at wine.com with a 50/150 coupon on a 20% RMN cash back day, the net cost of the Albe (including shipping once you’ve paid the $50 for Stewardship) is $18.25 per bottle.
More details on the Raise cards at this post earlier in this thread:
https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3201087#p3201087
My wine.com referral (we each get a $30 off coupon, not sure the purchase required to use it) - https://refer.wine.com/David180
(I’m not sure if rmn has a referral program).
My TopCashback referral https://www.topcashback.com/ref/member931667258437
Third, you’ll want to sign up for “stewardship” on wine.com with your first order - $50 gets you unlimited shipping for a year.
Fourth, if you have an Amex card, wine.com (and other merchants/wineries including Zachys and Wine Access) occasionally have offers which you can see in the “Amex Offers and Benefits” section of the Amex website. These have to be activated by “enrolling” in them on the Amex website, and then you follow the terms and conditions shown for the offer (these include expiration date and how many times the offer can be used - typically once, except Wine Access tends to allow up to three times). These might be something like a $30 statement credit if you spend $150. These can be “stacked” with all of the other discounts shown above except the Raise gift cards. If the Amex offer is for wine.com, you need to make the wine.com purchase with your enrolled Amex card, not with gift cards. A couple of important points here - 1) The minimum purchase amount is based on what’s charged to your card. So if you use a coupon code to get your $150 purchase down to $100, it will count as $100, not $150, toward the Amex minimum. But if you are getting 20% RMN cash back on that purchase, it will still count as $100 for the Amex offer, not $80, since the $100 is still being charged to your card and the $20 cash back doesn’t come through Amex. I don’t know for sure if sales tax counts so to be safe I always make sure my pre-tax but post-coupon total qualifies for the offer. 2) These offers all have expiration dates and your card needs to be charged before the expiration date. Wine.com does not charge your card until your order ships, so if you delay shipping due to weather, or if a shipping delay happens on their end, you may not get the Amex statement credit if that delay takes your ship date past the expiration date.
Once you are signed up, just:
-
Log in to the portal (RMN or Rakuten) site. Make sure your ad-blocker is off or that you’ve whitelisted the portal site and the wine.com site. Search for wine.com on the portal, and click on the link to use the “cash back” offer.
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Shop for the wine you want at wine.com. Make sure you emptied your shopping cart and logged out of wine.com last time you were there - if you didn’t, do so now and then start over at step 1 above. Check out using your coupon code. Make sure you don’t use any other “discount finder” browser plug-ins (like “honey”) to search for or try other coupon codes, as they will disable the portal’s cash back offer. One wine.com, coupon codes are not valid on wines with prices ending in 7 and occasionally other wines are restricted too, but most of the inventory is available with the coupon. Monitor this thread for new coupon codes - Jin also tries to keep the first post on page one current by deleting expired codes and adding new ones, and by periodically posting the complete list of non-expired codes. Remember, though, that you can only use each code one time.
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Pay with the gift cards you bought on raise if you went that route, or with your favorite cash back or points credit card, or with your enrolled Amex if taking advantage of an Amex Offer.
IMPORTANT - If you are going to pay with a raise gift card, copy the gift card number from the raise site and paste it into your wine.com account first, then close out of everything (empty your cart and log out off all sites) and start your shopping trip over at step 1. If you wait until the “pay” step to copy and paste your gift card number, that can result in switching the tracking credit for your wine.com purchase from the cash back portal you are using to raise.com, and can mess up your cash back rebate.
- Collect the cash back down the road per the terms of the portal (45 days later for RMN, once a quarter for Rakuten, 3-4 months later for TopCashback).
That’s it. Pretty simple once you get the hang of it, even though it sounds complicated. The above instructions apply on a computer, but of course all of these places also have mobile apps you can use. Just start with the RMN or Rakuten app and click through to pull up the wine.com app.
IMPORTANT - For RMN, the max rebate per order is $50, so on 20% days, anything beyond $250 (after coupon) will not earn additional cash back. You can place multiple orders on the same day to get around this cap and to use multiple coupons, even for the same wine (this is where the “stewardship” shipping program comes in handy), but you can only earn RMN cash back on 7 orders per calendar month (based on the date you activated the RMN offer and placed the order).
That should just about cover it…
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Thanks for all that info on how you guys are doing it! But NO…I’m not going to jump through all those hoops to buy some wine at a discount…probably stuff I really don’t even want? I’ll take the $50 off the 150, or 100 off the 300…maybe do that on mult buys of a wine to get a nice discount…do the free shipping stuff…but that’s I’ll the energy I have to buy wine…or anything else for that matter. I’m a see it, like it, buy it, kind of guy…at hopefully a good price.
I was looking at picking up some Delamotte Brut/BdB…put it in the cart for checkout, and I wasn’t able to buy it for some reason as it didn’t show up in the cart? Chatted with the “expert” and they said it was not eligible to ship to CA if it doesn’t show up in cart…but then confirmed it should be able to ship to CA.??? The Rose worked, but not the other wines. So…I didn’t get my wine, or my discount, and wasted my time.
Hey Buzz,
The discount codes will only work on wines that don’t end in .97. A lot of higher end and older stuff won’t work. Retailmenot.com is definitely worth it, takes 45 days but you get an extra 10% or 20% off. Roll it into your Venmo and pay the babysitter or in my case, the dog groomer.
It takes some work to not just buy stuff because you’re getting a discount but you can get some great deals on good wines with a little bit of work. I do lots of searches for types of wine I’m interested, sort by Professional rating and add to my cart if I’m interested in it. Then from your cart use Save for Later. You can get a pretty good list of wines to grab when the discounts come out. I’ve pretty much filled in my Bordeaux collection this way, mostly onesies and twosies but I’ve got a pretty decent selection going back almost 15 years all at well below current prices and even below average consumer price, which would include people buying before release.
When the discount coupons were hot and heavy I had a spreadsheet with all the wines I was interested in, the discounted price and the wine-searcher low price and would sort by savings. Codes have been coming out in dribbles now 
The raise.com gift card stuff probably isn’t worth it if you don’t want to deal with the hassle, but the 20% RMN cash back is basically free money for very little added work. Just go through the RMN portal, put stuff in your cart, add the coupon, then check out.
LOL, I did think it was funny to see Buzz here on the discount page slumming it with the plebes looking for cheap Albe. Hopefully the primer helps someone out there.
And Chris is right, none of this stuff is as hard as it sounds, including the gift cards, once you get the hang of it. I wouldn’t do all this for a single purchase, but if you’re going to do it regularly, it’s very little added time after the initial setup, and the savings are insane.
Same boat here, I appreciate the info but not gonna go through the effort.
This is where I’m at. Codes and cash back? Absolutely. The gift cards seem like a lot of hassle (and headache) for very little marginal benefit.
Totally get it, this is definitely not for everybody. Honestly, I’m glad it’s not straightforward and there are some barriers to entry. That just means the discount train might last a little longer for the rest of us.
Wow this is next-level stuff. Agree with the others this adds more time to the process but hats off to anyone that has the patience to go through these steps. I like snagging a 100/300 or 50/150 from time to time but half the time I forget to stack with RMN or rakuten!
For wine.com the following was minimal effort for maximum value in my experience:
- $50 for 12-months free shipping (StewardShip)
- Rakuten/RetailMeNot portal 10/20% cash back days
- high % Coupon Codes ($50 off $150; $20 off $50)
- Price discernment versus wine-searcher.com
= many, many satisfying value purchases typically of 2 - 5 bottle lots
For WineAccess.com, the credits are nice but infrequent once you spam your friends the first few times. After that the 15-20% off links coupled with volume discounts (6 or 12 bottles typically) make it worthwhile for me.
NOTE: the above situations both have cashback offers via AmEx cards that create insane deals when everything lines up. Unfortunately once you figure out the nuances of the trade, you burn through these cashback offers quickly and they then diminish in value if not disappear entirely.
I was wary about Raise, but its is definitely worth it at least once, the first time you can get $200 for $172.33 by using the $5 referral and the discount code “FIRST”. Here’s my link if you want to try. Sign Up - Raise (i also get $5)
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If you look back in this thread, you can see that I began all this as a skeptic with statements like wdc has nothing I’m interested in, their starting prices are way too high, etc. But I’m a convert.
I would not do any of this, much less all of it, for one or two purchases. But they carry enough interesting stuff, among all the rest, where the starting prices are close enough to the competition (even if a bit higher) that it’s worth it if you’re going to keep making purchases as new coupons come around and as RMN 20% days come and go. It’s not that much effort to repeat the process once you’ve done it initially, but obviously it’s not for everyone.
And of course I agree that if too many folks do it, well, they’ll probably shut it down eventually. But at the moment, WDC seems to be chasing top line revenue over bottom line profit, including by enabling these kinds of discounts. It’s up to you if you want to take them up on the offer. To each his or her own.