Deal Website Review: FatWallet

Posted on November 5, 2009. Filed under: Deals | Tags: Bargains, Cash Back, Coupons, Deals, FatCash, FatWallet, review, Shopping, Technology |

Are you looking for a website to combine Online Coupon Finding with Deal posting, all within a sleek web 2.0 look? Then look no further than FatWallet.com! FatWallet does some very interesting things, and looks real good while doing it. Offering coupons, deals, and a nifty cash back program, FatWallet might just become your one-stop shop for any kind of bargain hunting.

Getting its roots as FatCash in 1999, it used to offer a program that gave small percentages of cash back to the customer for shopping at participating stores. Since then, it has expanded to be known as one of the most popular site to get ads and deals from top stores. This popularity has lead it into legal trouble at times, though. FatWallet is known to break Black Friday (a date quickly approaching!) deals to members of their site often much before any of the stores release their ad. Due to this, big names like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have threatened to sue FatWallet referencing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and saying that their ads were copyrighted. Luckily for shoppers, it seems as if none of the potential cases have actually gone through.

FatWallet has four main features that I would like to discuss:

Coupons

Though not done perhaps better than sites like RetailMeNot for coupon codes, FatWallet does a decent job in showing users the hottest coupons currently available by top stores on the web. These are coupons generated from the sites bustling forums with many active users submitting all the coupons. These are then sorted by category and by store name, giving you a not so pretty list view of the coupons for each store. Where the “Coupons & Cash Back” section of the site really shines though, is the cash back part.

Cash Back

Here’s where the uniqueness of FatWallet comes into play. FatWallet has signed with stores to get commission on sales that they bring to those stores, and in turn FatWallet has decided to give a percentage of cash back to the customer as long as they are a member of their site. These percentages seem to range anywhere from 1% to 10% cash back, depending on the store. Also, stores will sometimes run “sales” where they’ll give double cash back, or some increased percentage for a small amount of time. A word of warning from us here at Tech on a Budget: Make sure you intended to use this feature often, or at least want to save up over a few purchases, because the minimum amount they will give you back is $10, and it might take awhile to earn that amount of money. Here’s how FatWallet explains it.

Top Deals

FatWallet has a very nice, and good-looking Deals section to their site, in which they will post the best deals (chosen by their staff) available to customers right now. It even has a great function for getting rid of expired deals so you know all of the viewable deals are available. These seem to be sorted in no particular order, and are given a small preview with a picture for each deal. Upon clicking further, you can see the specifics for the deal and even a small snippet on why the FatWallet staff likes that certain deal. Very slick and user-friendly.

Forums

The forums is where the meat of the site exists, though it may not be the site’s most popular feature. Here is where many forum members will post about new and hot deals coming out from retailers everywhere, so that they can then be put in the other sections of the website, though these deals often tend to be somewhat skewed in favor of tech items (not a problem for us!). A couple things worth noting are that the forums will often feature a lot of wonderful posts on free stuff you can find around the web, as well as financial help, and contests and sweepstakes.

If you are looking for a website that has it all, then FatWallet may be right up your alley. Just make sure you don’t spend too much time there, or you may forget what you were looking for in the first place!