Turbocharge Your Rewards With Shopping Portals

Tl;dr: Earn tons of points or cash back by clicking through a shopping portal like Rakuten before making online purchases. 

Thanks to my IHG Premier card, I often book rooms at IHG hotels like the Holiday Inn, where I get perks like room upgrades and late checkout, and earn 26 IHG points for each dollar I spend. That’s pretty good, and often ends up being my best option when booking hotels. But if I start my search at Rakuten, and let them send me to IHG.com, I can get another 3(-9!) Amex points per dollar spent–even though I’m not using my Amex card. This is the magic of shopping portals. 

The Concept
Shopping portals are basically just a sales commission system. The portals offer points, miles, or cash back to consumers who use the portals to make purchases. The company gets a sale, the consumer gets a bonus, and the portal gets a cut.

The Portals
There are a ton of these out there, but the best known option is probably Rakuten (you might have seen their Super Bowl commercials). Swagbucks is another popular option. Both usually offer nice sign-up bonuses: you can get $30 in cash back after spending $30 on Rakuten via this referral link, and $10 in cashback after spending $25 on Swagbucks via this referral link. 

Capital One, Chase, and Citi all have similar portals that will reward you in their points, and if you have an American Express card you can elect to earn Membership Rewards points at Rakuten. Most major airlines also have portals of their own. 

With so many options, it can be helpful to use an aggregator like Cashback Monitor to see which portals are offering the best deals prior to starting your shopping trip.

Potential Savings
You could easily save hundreds of dollars each year by funneling your online shopping through shopping portals, and perhaps diverting some brick-and-mortar purchases to the portals as well. It only takes a few seconds to check if there’s a portal option on a merchant or particular product, and your points or cash back will stack up quickly. Most also offer browser extensions that will pop up automatically to inform you if cash back is available when you visit a merchant’s website.

Portals are especially good for major expenses, such as electronics, furniture, and hotel stays, but much, if not most, of your online purchases will be possible to do through a portal. Beyond online retail and travel, there are also a few less obvious but extremely valuable ways to take advantage of shopping portals:

Shop in-store: Some portals offer the ability to activate offers to get cash back even when shopping in-store. For instance, as I write this (offers come and go) you can link a credit card (or more than one) to your Rakuten account and receive 1% cash back on your in-store purchases at Wal-Mart. An app-based portal, Dosh (referral link here; earn $1 just for linking your card), will show you in-store opportunities near you. At the time of writing, it offers 5% back in-store at Under Armour, 10% at Subway, 15% at Rack Room Shoes, 10% at furniture store Raymour & Flanigan, and 10% at Ikea. 

Eat: While you might hear “shopping” portal and think “retail,” you can also order takeout and delivery from Grubhub and receive points or cash from Rakuten. Or you can use your linked card with various restaurants with Dosh.

Gift cards: One of my favorite, admittedly less lazy, hacks is using the United shopping portal app, MileagePlusX, to buy e-gift cards. For certain spending categories that don’t earn bonus points (or at least not with any cards you have in your wallet), you can significantly boost your points by purchasing a gift card through United with a strong everyday value card. 

For example, United is offering 2 miles per dollar spent on gift cards from Airbnb, Lowes, Regal Cinemas, and Apple, 3x with Hulu, Pep Boys, and AMC theaters, 4x with Fandango, Cinemark, and the Gap, and 5x with Adidas, Jiffy Lube, and Petco. The vast majority of cards earn just one point or cent per dollar on those purchases, so your best option might be a 2x card like the Capital One Venture X or Citi Double Cash. If you know you’re going to buy a new Mac, or go to the movies, or stay in an Airbnb, you can use those 2x cards to buy a gift card and get those same baseline points plus the bonus United points. (Note that by taking this approach you’ll lose out on any purchase protections on your card, like extended warranty or return protection, that would apply if you made the purchase directly with the card rather than with a gift card.) United also regularly offers double miles on rotating merchants, so keep an eye out for opportunities for even more miles.

Holidays: It’s fairly common to see the airline shopping portals offer bonuses for signing up, and then again regularly around various holidays. These are usually pretty modest; 500 miles for spending $100 is common. I would never recommend spending that kind of money for that kind of bonus. But you may want to wait to register for the airline portals until you’re ready to take advantage of a welcome offer, or time your larger purchases around the holiday promotions.

Referral Links
Rakuten (typically $30 back after spending $30)
Swagbucks (typically $10 back after spending $25)
Dosh (typically $1 back after linking a credit card)