Sears Shop Your Way Points

I have never been a loyal Sears customer, but recently I’ve found myself ordering quite a few items from them. In fact, their “Shop Your Way” deals on certain electronics items have been pretty spectacular. When you combine the points with a miles earning portal bonus, you can often buy electronics for cheaper than any other source online.

How Do Sears Shop Your Way Points Work?

Shop your way points work just like cash that you can redeem for any item at Sears, even auto repairs in the Sears Auto Service Center. The points are tracked in your free account once you sign up. If you are not already a member, I highly encourage signing up for an account on your next Sears or K-mart visit, or here online. Each point is worth one penny meaning that 1,000 points is worth $1.00.

Shop Your Way Elite Status

One of the great features of the program is elite status, which confers additional promotions, higher point earning opportunities, and free stuff. The table below summarizes the different elite status tiers.

What makes the program compelling for value shoppers are the coupons that Sears sends you every few weeks where you can earn bonus points for either buying a specific product, or for your entire purchase. One example is the coupon below where you can earn $10 back in points for spending $50. The best part is that this coupon is often stackable with other coupons, meaning that you can often combine this storewide coupon with a $5 off $25 in apparel, or $10 off $75 in electronics. In fact, sometimes Sears will offer a point earning bonus on a specific item like recently when they offered $100 back in points for buying a $500 Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablet. If you combined additional offers with the product specific bonus, you could get $350 or more off your purchase.

Stacking of Sears Shop Your Way Coupons

I have known some people to go to the very extreme of stacking Sears Shop Your Way discounts. This often requires a little extra work upfront, but can often result in huge savings. Let me give you an example.

1. First, you need to buy a Sears gift card at a discounted price. Usually you can buy the gift cards for 5-10% below face value at a 3rd party site like Raise, Cardpool, or eBay. Assuming that you buy it for 10% off, you are already getting a solid discount.
2. Go to the Shop Your Way site and click on “coupons” at the top to load coupons into your account. This is a critical step, and a lot of people tend to ignore this step, but it can yield huge dividends. Like is said earlier, you can load $20 off $75, $10 off $50 coupons, which only increase the amount of your discount. Usually I can get 20% off by applying the right coupons.
3. Next, before you go to Sears.com to buy your item, go through a shopping portal to earn an additional discount. Sears likes to vary the affiliate partner discounts, so I usually just go to Cashbackmonitor.com to find which site is offering the largest amount of cashback or miles. Often you can find a discount of 5-10% or even more through one of these partners. I usually try to earn at least 10% by going through one of these portals.
4. Now that you are on Sears site you can find the items you want to buy and get your discount. Sometimes it pays off to shop around and find items that have a product specific bonus and buy those. Certain bloggers will in fact buy these items only to resell them later through Amazon or eBay. This is quite a pain for most of us and involves quite a bit of a time and cash investment, but can be an effective tool at times to build up your frequent flyer mileage balance, or meet a minimum spend requirement for a credit card sign up bonus. To find these offers click on the “Shop Your Way Exclusives” link at the top left of the page (as shown below).

  Finally, one great example of a product specific bonus is on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 16 GB. If you buy this tablet you will earn $100 back in Sears Shop Your Way rewards. That is in addition to any other coupons, gift card discounts, and portal bonuses you get. Bottom Line Sears has developed a very rewarding, and rather sophisticated loyalty program. They are constantly making tweaks and updates to it, but I find it to be pretty reliable in terms of accruing points and keeping track of balances. Redeeming points is incredibly easy and flexible. I have used my points to make simple purchases in store at K-mart, online at Sears, and at the Sears Auto Center. Of course, the main drawback of Sears is their horrible in store experience.  Dilapidated stores, poorly staffed and ill trained customer service associates, and outdated merchandise are just a few of their issues, but I have found their online store to be a refreshing alternative to their bricks and mortar alter ego. Has Sears sucked me into becoming loyal due to an incredibly addictive rewards program? Well, it’s worked so far, now they just need to keep delivering on great product selection and I will continue to shop there!