Earn extra rewards using Shopping Portals (2021)

A straightforward way to earn extra rewards on most of your online purchases is to visit the store through a "shopping portal". You'll usually earn extra 2-10% in cash or points on top of whatever you'd earn from your credit card.

Rather than going directly to the store you want to shop at, you visit the shopping portal and click on the name of the store where you want to shop. You'll then be taken to the online store where you can shop normally. But, as long as you don't close the browser window, you'll earn extra rewards from the shopping portal.

Behind the scenes, the shopping portal is being paid an "affiliate fee" for sending customers to the online store and they are sharing part of that fee with you.

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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 item. 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 (other than those that are part of their existing loyalty account), 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.

If you have a Chase Ultimate Rewards Card you may often want to take advantage of earning Ultimate Rewards points with Chase's shopping portal, and as already mentioned, Rakuten can often be a good choice because of its Membership Rewards option.

On the other hand, you can often earn a small bonus reward for opening a new shopping portal account. Or at least earn a referral bonus for a spouse or friend.
RetailMeNot can often be the best shopping portal and isn't listed on Cashback Monitor. Rather than giving you a fixed percentage back, many of its offers are in the form "Get $x back on your purchase of $y or more". For example, rather than getting 5% back, you might get $10 back on purchases of $100. This can often work out better than other shopping portals, but doesn't work out particularly well for very small or very large purchases. Unfortunately, since they don't always follow the standard pattern, you'll need to check them separately.
AwardWallet can track your account with many of the shopping portals. We recommend adding each shopping portal account to your loyalty program list. Use AwardWallet to Easily Manage Your Loyalty Program Information.
Try to cash out your rewards fairly frequently. You never know if one of the 3^rd party is going to close down, so periodically transfer out any cash rewards to your bank account. If the shopping portal earns loyalty points these are added to your main account automatically.
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.

It only takes a little bit of extra time to visit Cashback Monitor, select the store you are interested in, click on the name of one your shopping portals that is offering good bonus rewards, and then click once more to visit the store, rather than navigating directly to the store's website.

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.

Airline and Hotel Shopping Portals