‘Tis the season for lots of shopping. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas coming up, this is also the season to be able to earn some extra points and miles for any and all of your purchases.
Shopping portals or cash back can provide huge extra incentives
These days, it’s more common to chase deals online vs in-store and getting up at 3am to battle the rabid crowds. Stores have also followed suit with deals becoming available way before Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Whenever I shop for something of significant value I head over to cashbackmonitor.com. This site aggregates all cashback sites with their bonuses and discounts.
See all available shopping portals in one view
On the homepage, you can search for a specific store and see what deals are available. For example if you pull up Nike you get the below:
As you can see you would be able to earn an easy 7% cash back on Ebates (one of the first and most popular portals) or 5 Ultimate Rewards points with Chase. There are a lot of less well-known shopping portals out there, but I would keep it simple and focus either on cash back, bank portal or a specific airline portal. Due to the holidays, there are plenty of offers with higher miles earning then usual. In the above you can see this through the strike-through numbers, like United at 4 miles/$, double their normal offer.
Getting started
You do need to register for all of these shopping portals to start your free money journey. As a strategy, it is a good idea to pick a few that meet your goals – both cashback and miles/points – and try and stick to those. Do you want to travel more internationally? Try United. Domestic travel more your speed? Southwest is always a good bet. We’ve been using Ebates for several years and have gotten almost $500 back. Credit card portals like Chase can be accessed directly from your Chase Account and Ultimate Rewards.
Many of these shopping portals also have brower plug-ins which make it incredibly easy by pulling up and being able to apply available offers directly while you’re shopping.
Airline shopping portals
All major airlines have their own shopping portals. They are also listed above, but sometimes also provide additional incentives to spend through them. United as an example currently offers the ability for new members that join the shopping portal and earn up to 1,500 bonus miles for eligible spend. With the extra miles plus the bonus, this is the season to rack up some extra miles. Other airlines will have similar offers and you should check what will fit in with your goals of earning rewards.
Summary
While particularly useful this time of the year, shopping portals provide great value year round. Any time I’m buying something, I am looking at cashbackmonitor.com to see if I can double dip and earn some easy, extra miles.
Have you utilized this to earn some extra miles for your next getaway?
