Hi my lovelies!
Lululemon is the topic of this post today, and the title really says it all! Lululemon is notorious for not having any "major" sales, where they markdown their rather exorbitantly priced products down by massive amounts, but they do have regular uploads to the We Made Too Much (WMTM) section, that does offer discounts of varying amounts, usually around the 25% to 30% range, but can be more depending on the item. But...what if you want more than just the regular discount? Or you want that pair of Black aligns that no matter what...never seem to go on sale. Well, I've got some tips and tricks for you! These can be really helpful for the current major summer sale that Lulu is hosting on their website (you've got until Monday!!), but overall for purchasing regular or sale items normally.
Rakuten is a rebate company that is super easy to sign-up with. They offer varying amounts of cash back, but currently it is at a 8% rebate on Lululemon purchases, which is pretty hefty, especially if you live in a state without sales tax. If you live in a tax heavy location like California or New York...well, it effectively means you make off the tax. They sometimes go as high as 10% cash back, so you should always keep checking!
You can sign up with Rakuten using an existing Google or Facebook account, and they will ask you to download an extension on to your browser. Once you have this extension, when you go to the Lululemon website, a little pop-up should come up from the Rakuten extension, and you just need to click "Activate Cash Back" and proceed shopping as normal!
Rakuten Pop-Up Button
Once you make your purchase, you can go to your Rakuten account and under the Shopping Trips tab, you can see your shopping trips by date and time and by brand. It will also tell you the ID of the shopping trip, and whether or not you made cash back or not.
Shopping Trip Tab
After roughly a day (Rakuten works super fast!), you'll be able to see in your Cash Back Balance Tab, how much cash back you made on your purchase, as well as any other bonuses you've accumulated. You can withdraw your cashback either via Check, or via Paypal. I personally recommend linking it to your Paypal, but it is up to your personal preference!
Cash Back Balance Tab
In terms of when that Cashback will actually reach you via Check or Paypal, Rakuten pays out its cash-back in a quarter cycle, which means that you will have to wait at most, 3 months before you get your money back, but, it offers higher cash-back than any other service out there for Lululemon.
Rakuten Payment Schedule
If you sign-up for Rakuten today, they'll give you a $10 offer bonus as well!
Honey is yet another cash-back/rebate service, which operates through an extension on your browser. Similar to Rakuten, you can sign up to Honey with either Google, Facebook or a separate account, and they will have you add an extension to your browser. Then, whenever you are on a website that is compatible with Honey, you can click on the extension and you'll se a pop-up asking you to activate your rewards.
Honey Extension Activation
However, unlike Rakuten, which offers a fixed rate for everyone, Honey operates on a randomized reward/rebate. You can see in the picture above that it says that the rewards rate is 1-12%. That means that you could have anywhere between a 1-12% reward, and most of the time it will tend towards the lower half of that rewards rate. You won't know how much you'll make back until after your purchase is completed.
Honey Gold Summary
Honey holds your cash-back, which is in the form of Honey Gold, for around 45-60 days, usually the return window of the store you bought from, in order to ensure that you don't return anything you bought. If you do return a portion of your purchases, then the Honey Gold will adjust based on how much you actually purchased. Unlike Rakuten, they don't have a quarterly schedule that they pay out your rebate, but you do have to have a minimum of 1000 Honey Gold before you can withdraw any money.
Additionally, you can only withdraw Honey Gold in the form of gift cards to stores such as Macys, Walmart, Target, Apple, Amazon, Sephora, Ebay and a few other companies. However, given the amount of money the average consumer spends on Amazon, I'd say it is still worth it!
Now, what is the benefit of using Honey over Rakuten? Usually Rakuten has a solid edge over, with a higher overall rebate rate guaranteed. But, once in a while, Honey will have something called Honey Gold Bonuses, which is a time-sensitive reward that usually offers 1000 Gold whenever you make a purchase from a particular store.
This basically means you get $10 off whatever you buy, no matter what. If you are buying just a single item, or something that is lower-priced, and you happen to have a Honey Gold Bonus just at the right time for Lululemon, its a better discount than Rakuten. When you click that you want to claim, you will have 24 hours to make a purchase at the store to receive the bonus. These typically appear in the Account Overview within 2-14 days of your purchase.
If you sign-up for Honey today, they'll give you a 500 Gold after your first purchase activating Honey, which is equivalent to a $5 gift card!
Yet another way to get a discount on Lululemon is to buy discounted gift cards from Raise.com. Raise is a marketplace for discounted gift cards, which they typically buy from individuals who want to sell their Lululemon gift cards for cash instead. They generally have discounted gift cards for 2.5% off (e.g. $500 gift card for $487.50), and are digital delivery gift cards, which means they will be sent to you immediately.
Alternatively, you can buy a Lululemon gift card for face value (not discounted), and get 3.0% Raise cash, which can then be used to buy more gift cards from the Raise website, but cannot be transferred to cash of other forms except by purchasing more from Raise.com. Also, Raise purchases for gift cards are not taxed (fun fact: you don't pay taxes on a gift card because you will be taxed for whatever you buy, so if you paid taxes on both the gift card and what you purchased, it would be double taxation).
Right now, Raise is doing a deal where new members get an extra 10% any discounted gift cards with the code FIRST, on your first purchase, so a $100 gift card with a 2.5% initial discount would be $97.50, and with the discount code, it would be $87.75. Additionally, if you sign-up with my link, you'll get another $5 in Raise cash, which comes out to a total of $82.75, which is a whopping 17.25% discount, more than double that of Rakuten's cash-back.
Also, another nice thing about Raise is that it actually a partner with Rakuten...which means that if you make a purchase on Raise, you can get a 1% cash-back.
Join Raise and get $5 off! Click to Sign-Up here!
The Math
So, I'm a math nerd, so I'm going to help do the math to let you see just how much you can save using the three different services I've listed here!
Using Raise
A pair of 25" Diamond Dye Lululemon Aligns come out to $118.00 before tax. In my state, taxes are insane, so post-tax a pair of these aligns comes out to $128.62 (unfortunate... I know...).
Now, if I bought a gift card for 128.62 at 2.5%, that would come out to paying $125.40 for a gift card valued to one pair of Diamond Dye Lululemon Aligns. However, right now, there is a deal for 10% off gift card purchases, so the gift-card total would actually only be $112.54. Coupled with the initial $5 discount from signing up with my link, the total price of a $128.62 gift card would be $107.54.
Moving on to the Rakuten rebates. Raise currently has a 1% rebate, so you would get a rebate of $1.07 for the gift card, making the end price $106.47. This gives a 17.22% discount!!
If you buy an item from the WMTM section, such as a discounted pair of aligns, which is typically $79, by the same math, you can get the leggings for only $63.68, which is a whopping 35% off, compared to just 19.4% that the regular WMTM price gives you.
Unfortunately, Raise doesn't always have such good deals as the 10% off of discounted gift cards, but they do regular promotions that can give you better deals on gift cards than just 2.5% or 3% rewards.
Using Rakuten
You cannot stack Rakuten cash-back with gift-cards or any other rebate service, like Honey, as they will ignore any portions of purchases made with gift-cards, so you can't double up on your gift-cards savings via Raise, along with the cash-back rates on Rakuten on the lululemon website, but you'll still get cash-back for your actual purchase on Raise. But, with the current 8% discount, if you buy something full-price, it will naturally be just an 8% discount, but if you buy the same pair of aligns for $79 on WMTM, they will be $72.68 instead, with a discount of 25.84% instead of just 19.4%.
Using Honey
It is unclear if Honey allows cash-back on purchases made on gift-cards, and like Rakuten, you can't double on up both Honey and Rakuten. Additionally, they say that exclusions are up to the discretion of the merchant, and Lululemon hasn't come out saying that they do or don't allow Honey cash-back on purchases made on gift-cards, but I haven't seen anything either for or against stacking, so maybe next time you shop with a gift card, try activating Honey and see if you can double on rewards there! Once again, with a mathematical comparison, you'll get a solid 1% to 12% depending on how your luck of the draw with the Honey randomizer, if you buy on regular-priced products, but you can get cash-back making your purchase $78.21 to $69.52 (if you are lucky) giving you savings from 20.19% to 29.06%.
My Recommendation
Each of these money-saving methods have their own merit. Rakuten is by far the most reliable, and generally gives the highest percentage of cash-back, but gift cards from Raise can also give better discounts if you can buy them when Raise is having a deal (like they are currently having) where they discount their already discounted gift cards even more.
Honey is probably the least effective contender (despite their really good marketing), because they give generally low percentages of cash-back. The only time I would pick Honey over Rakuten as a cash-back service is if there is a Honey Gold Bonus deal happening on Lululemon, which is generally pretty rare, but its easy enough to check via the extension!
But, using any of these options is better than not using none of them!
I hope these tips are helpful for keeping your Lululemon addiction from taking over your checkbook (which honestly, it definitely has for me since I discovered Lulu a bit over a year ago), and please share in the comments any tips and tricks you have for saving money on Lulu!
If you want to find inexpensive dupe alternatives to Lululemon items, you can check out any of my posts under the Lululemon tag, or just take a look at these master spreadsheets!
As always, I'd appreciate it if you subscribe to this blog! I'm constantly updating with new dupe discoveries and reviews and your support means the world to me to know that I have readers! I love comments and feedback as well, so don't hesitate to share your own experiences with using Rakuten, Honey, or even Raise or any of your own tips and tricks!
Happy Hunting! Happy Shopping! Happy Saving!
Caly Out!
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