I was a member of ipoints last year, because I am a big fan of survey sites, but after being a member for a few months, I found I was not getting many survey invitations and so I terminated my membership, as the points were totting up much slower than the other survey sites like Lightspeed and valued opinions.


However, I recently resubscribed to ipoints as I discovered they were partners with the superb Mysupermarket.com. Basically, this is a site where you do your shopping online, and it tells you which online retailer is the cheapest. this is a fantastic site in its own right, but even sweeter because if you sign up to ipoints, you get 1 point for every pound you spend up to 80 points. This is money for nothing, because we all have to shop, so if I go through mysupermarket I get clubcard/nectar points as well as ipoints on my weekly shop!


The ipoints site is really interesting, and when you join up, they make you fill in some short surveys to assertain your interests. Basically, the whole site is run on the premise of targetted advertising. they have several partners, such as Debenhams and boots, and if you shop through their site you can earn ipoints as you shop. You can also earn extra points for signing up to email alerts and newsletters, as well as competition and survey sites.


I have found that it is a good idea to have a seperate email address linked to your ipoints account, because as you can choose to earn points from receiving newsletters, your inbox can get quite full. You can sign up to as much or as little as you want. You can also get free ipoints for answering surveys.


The surveys don't come about very often, but when they do they are quite interesting and fun to complete. One I did recently was to do with diferent perspectives on Supermarket shopping. Sometimes they even ask you to attend focus groups, where you can be paid £20.


Redeeming points is easy. The site has a link to redeem your points, and then it is a case of choosing a reward partner. Personally, I like redeeming my rewards for moonpig cards. For about 650 ipoints you can get a personalised card sent to someone. My brother was ill at the time with a broken leg, so i sent him a really nice card with his name on. he didn't know I got it for free.


Ipoints is great because you can tailor it to your own shopping habits. If you are going to buy something from, say, HMV or Debenhams, you may as well get it via the site and earn yourself some free cash, and at 80 points per week on grocery shops, they add up pretty quickly.