Earn extra rewards using Shopping Portals (2021)
Jump to
Shopping Portal Tips
-
You can use Cashback Monitor to find the portal that offers the most valuable rewards for the store you want to shop at. It compares the reward rates across dozens of shopping portals. You need to be careful when you look at the listings, because sometimes the best offers are labelled as "Up to x%" and are listed at the bottom.
You won't earn rewards on every purchase. Each merchant with each portal has fine print about which transactions are included and which are excluded. For example, most merchants exclude gift card purchases and sites like Amazon excludes most categories of purchases. What actually winds up counting doesn't always correspond to the terms. We just use a portal whenever we shop, without worrying about the terms, hope that it "tracks", and don't worry too much if it doesn't.
With Rakuten, you can earn Membership Rewards points instead of straight cash back. When you set up your account, you can choose whether you want to receive cash or Membership Rewards points. For example, if a store is offering 5% back, you can receive 5x Membership Rewards points instead. As long as you are comfortable using your points for frequent flyer tickets (or can cash out with the Schwab or Business Platinum Card), Membership Rewards are worth more than 1 cent each. As a result, rewards from this portal are worth about 50% more than the percentage shown. Rakuten is the new name for the long-standing Ebates shopping portal.
Many people will want to stick to a small number of shopping portals, rather than always going with the one that offers the best rewards for each individual purchase. This saves the time it takes to open and manage your accounts. In addition, you often need to build up a minimum reward balance before you can cash-out your rewards.
Top Cashback, BeFrugal, and RebatesMe are good options that work reliable and usually have good rates. As mentioned, Rakuten can often be a good option because of its Membership Rewards option.
Ad-blockers and other security tools can wreak havoc with transaction tracking. Many people use browser for all their shopping purchases. For example, if you normally browse with Chrome, you can use Edge or Safari for your online shopping, or vise versa, and configure the shopping browser to allow ads and cross-site tracking.
Loyalty program shopping portals
Most frequent flyer programs, hotel programs, and credit card rewards programs have their own shopping portals.
They can be a great way to earn some points to keep your loyalty accounts alive. With many loyalty programs, your points will expire after a certain number of months of inactivity. Earning some points by shopping through the portal resets the clock for expiration. Since points can take weeks to actually post to your account, avoid trying to do this at the very last minute.
Shopping portals from the major US airlines often have promotions, where you can earn thousands of bonus miles for using the portals for a certain amount of spending during a specified period of time. The extra rewards boost often makes it worthwhile to go out of your way to use the portals during the promotions.
