Shopping Portals

While credit card sign up bonuses represent the easiest method of collecting volumes of miles and points, they are by no means the only method. The two most commonly known methods for collecting miles are actual flying and staying in hotels, and regular spending on one’s miles and points earning credit cards.

But I wanted to share one method that is often overlooked, shopping portals. If you are like the majority of people today, then you have done some online shopping. And like most, you probably go directly to the store website and make your purchases. If so, then you are missing out on valuable miles and points. Every major airline and most major hotel chains have a shopping portal that will earn you bonus points for signing into their site and clicking through to your store of interest. So does Chase Ultimate Rewards and Discover Card. There are websites dedicated to providing the best shopping portal bonuses for your store of interest. One that I have used often is evreward.com, but I have recently found that this site has not been accurately updated. It’s still a good source to find what shopping portals exist. 

 

The way that shopping portals work is that you login to your shopping portal of choice, and then you find the store of interest and click on the store link. This directs you to the store website, but the shopping portal tracks your purchases and provides you miles and points credits based on your purchases. Shopping portals are not limited to traditional online stores. Even Groupon and Living Social have a portal presence. The one big online store that does not have a portal presence is Amazon.

Do you want to earn 5% on your Groupon purchases? Try the Discover Card shopping portal. Discover and Chase does require that you have an account with them to access their shopping portals.

The best part of using shopping portals is that you can “double-dip”. In other words, you can use your miles/points credit card to make your purchases through the shopping portal, get the bonus points for going through the portal, and still get your usual credit card points/miles.

Who already does all of their online shopping through shopping portals?