Difference between revisions of "TravelStrategies: *Citi Price Rewind and Other Price Matching Services"

Revision as of 20:37, 27 June 2019

Many credit cards provide "price protection" for anything you buy with the card. If the item you buy drops in price, within the first 60 or 90 days, the credit card company will refund the price difference. You’re even covered, if the lower price becomes available at a different store. Many stores have a similar policy themselves, regardless of the credit card you used to make the purchase.

For example, if you use your Wells Fargo Visa Signatgure card to purchase a microwave at BestBuy for $220, and a few weeks later, the same model goes on sale for $189 at Walmart, Wells Fargo will reimburse you $31.

The main obstacle is that it can be time-consuming to monitor the prices of the items you’ve recently purchased. Fortunately, there are several options that attempt to do much of the work for you.

Taking advantage of these automated price tracking tools makes it much more likely that you’ll take advantage of your card's potentially lucrative “purchase price protection” benefit, and save hundreds of dollars per year.

Several 3^rd party services automate price matching requests, at least for some of your purchases. Once you register, you’ll just start receiving occasional automatic reimbursements, without having to take any additional action. These services include Earny, Paribus, and Sift.

Each of these services automatically monitors what you purchase, by scanning your email for store receipts, and by logging into your Amazon account on your behalf. If they can identify a receipt AND identify individual products on the receipt that match products in their database, they can automatically track the price of your purchases.
If they find a lower price at one of their monitored merchants, they will automatically file a reimbursement claim on your behalf.

All three services file claims directly with the store, if it has a price-drop guarantee. For example, if you buy something at Macy’s, and they can find a lower price, they will ask Macy’s to refund the difference.
Both Earny and Sift will also work with any Citibank card that has a price protection benefit. (They used to automatically support Chase cards, but Chase has since eliminated price protection from all of its cards.) If the store won’t provide reimbursement, they will file a claim with the credit card company instead.
In many cases, the service will automatically send an email from your account, in your name, to the customer service department, to request the reimbursement.

If you are uncomfortable giving them access to your main email account, you could forward receipts from some merchants to a separate account, or start using a separate email account directly at checkout.
Because they work by looking at your email, they are primarily useful for products you’ve bought online, rather than at a physical store. However, some physical stores can send you an email-based receipt. Of course, nothing precludes you from manually filing additional claims.
Each service has a slightly different list of supported merchants, so it can be worthwhile to see if one of them uniquely supports a store that is important to you. Earny supported merchants, Paribus supported merchants, Sift supported merchants.
To pay for the service, Earny takes 25% of any reimbursements that you receive. Both Paribus and Sift are currently free.

TravelStrategies:*Citi Price Rewind and Other Price Matching Services/Main

Credit Cards 101

Automatic Protection for the Things You Buy with Your Credit Card

Best Credit Cards for Retail Purchases

TravelStrategies:*Citi Price Rewind and Other Price Matching Services/NextPages

TravelStrategies:*Citi Price Rewind and Other Price Matching Services/Page

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 Many credit cards provide "price protection" for anything you buy with the card. If the item you buy drops in price, within the first 60 or 90 days, the credit card company will refund the price difference. You’re even covered, if the lower price becomes available at a different store. Many stores have a similar policy themselves, regardless of the credit card you used to make the purchase.
-For example, if you use your Citi DoubleCash card to purchase a microwave at BestBuy for $220, and a few weeks later, the same model goes on sale for $189 at Walmart, Citibank will reimburse you $31.
+For example, if you use your Wells Fargo Visa Signatgure card to purchase a microwave at BestBuy for $220, and a few weeks later, the same model goes on sale for $189 at Walmart, Wells Fargo will reimburse you $31.
 The main obstacle is that it can be time-consuming to monitor the prices of the items you’ve recently purchased. Fortunately, there are several options that attempt to do much of the work for you.
@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 {{Main|article}}
-=== Citibank Price Rewind ===
+'''Several 3<sup>rd</sup> party services automate price matching requests, at least for some of your purchases'''. Once you register, you’ll just start receiving occasional automatic reimbursements, without having to take any additional action. These services include '''[//www.earny.co/home Earny]''', '''[//paribus.co/ Paribus]''', and '''[//www.siftwallet.com/ Sift]'''.
-Citibank heavily promotes its '''[//www.citipricerewind.com/ Price Rewind]''' feature. As a result, many people think that Citibank has the only credit cards that will reimburse you, when an item you buy drops in price.
-<ul class="bulletlist">
-<li>'''In fact, many credit cards provide price protection, but only Citibank has a program that is designed to make it easier for you to take advantage of this feature'''. Citi’s Price Rewind makes it more likely that you’ll actually wind up getting some money back each year.</li>
-{{Image|PriceRewind.png}}
-<li>'''To use Price Rewind, you still need to register your purchase on the Citibank website'''. You select the item you purchased from a database, and upload your receipt. If the item is in the database, Citibank will automatically track the lowest available price from a large number of online websites.</li>
-Note that merchants usually don’t tell credit card companies what you purchase, only the total amount you spent. Citibank has no way to automatically register the items you bought, even if they wanted to. So, you have to do that part manually.
-<li>'''If the item becomes available for a lower price, during the first 60 days after your purchase, they will send you an email with a link to claim the reimbursement'''. If the item isn't in the database, you can't take advantage of Price Rewind, and will have to track any price changes yourself.</li>
-<li>'''If you don’t register with Price Rewind, you can still manually make a claim against your Citi card’s price protection benefit'''. As with any price protection benefit, there are important [//www.citipricerewind.com/guide limitations and exclusions], regardless of whether you are doing things manually, or taking advantage of the Price Rewind monitoring service.</li>
-</ul>
-=== Completely automatic price protection ===
-Citibank's Price Rewind makes the process somewhat simpler, but you still need to remember to go online and take the time to register each purchase, scan and upload your receipts, keep around a physical copy, and follow through to receive any reimbursements—so it is still something that can be hard to take advantage of.
-'''Several 3<sup>rd</sup> party services can make it completely automatic, at least for some of your purchases'''. Once you register, you’ll just start receiving occasional automatic reimbursements, without having to take any additional action. These services include '''[//www.earny.co/home Earny]''', '''[//paribus.co/ Paribus]''', and '''[//www.siftwallet.com/ Sift]'''.
 {{Image|Paribus.jpg}}