Using Rakuten and other shopping portals
Shopping portals
An online shopping portal is a website from which you originate an online shopping trip. The site offers a discount for the merchants in its portal. There are airline, credit card, and cash back portals. I have accounts with Southwest, United, and American Airlines, as well as with Chase. Ultimately, I decided to originate almost all my portal traffic from Rakuten.
Rakuten
Rakuten is an online shopping portal based in the Bay Area of California and founded in 1997 as Ebates. It's an easy way to earn extra cash on top of the points you're getting back from your credit card spend. I've been getting a couple hundreds dollars a quarter from Rakuten lately just by doing my normal shopping for groceries, clothes, software, trip activities, flowers, and cosmetics (wife and daughters). Rakuten partners with over 3,500 stores, so it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for. Rakuten can give cash back because they are paid a commission by stores to drive traffic. When you buy something, Rakuten shares that commission with you.
How to Use Rakuten
Sign up for Rakuten. If you sign up for Rakuten with my link, you'll get $30 back on the first $30 you spend at Rakuten.
Start your shopping with the Rakuten app, browser extension or at rakuten.com. When you’ve earned cash back, you’ll get an email or notification for Rakuten.
Every three months, Rakuten will either send you a physical check or deposit the money in your PayPal account.
Using Rakuten is simple for me. I just installed the Chrome browser extension. When a site has a deal with Rakuten, a pop-up appears, telling me what the cash-back percentage is for that site. Other times, if I'm going to buy something at Amazon or REI, Rakuten will pop up explaining that the product is available cheaper somewhere else and I can get cash back.
Use Rakuten in-store
Rakuten can also be used in-store. In-Store Cash Back allows Rakuten members to earn cash back when shopping in person at participating local retail stores. Just link one or more eligible American Express, Mastercard or Visa credit cards to your Rakuten account and add available In-Store Cash Back offers to your card(s). When you shop at participating local stores and pay with your eligible linked card, you’ll automatically earn Cash Back on qualifying purchases.
Interesting note: A friend showed me that Rakuten was deducting $2.00 each month from his account balance. After reading the Rakuten Terms and Conditions, I see they can debit your Rakuten account $5.00 each month as a "maintenance fee" if you haven't used Rakuten in the past 12 months.
If you sign up for Rakuten with my link, you'll get $40 back on the first $40 you spend at Rakuten.
Cashback Monitor
If you want to juggle a few online portals to get maximum value, you need Cashback Monitor. Cashback Monitor is a free site that allows you to track which portals have the best rates at that moment. For example, the best reward rate at this moment for Sephora purchases is the Chase Portal (8%), followed by American Airlines (7%), and Rakuten at "up to 6%."
The best advice is to try to begin every shopping trip inside a shopping portal. Supplement that with discounted gift cards loaded onto the site. Then, use the credit card that offers you maximum savings in terms of that spending category.
So, as I'm writing this, the awesome shoe company Allbirds is offering 5% back on my Chase Freedom Unlimited (up to $10 back). This is through Chase Offers. This is on top of the 1.5% that I'm getting back for this using this card for this purchase. Rakuten is then paying 2% cash back for shopping through its portal. On a hypothetical $100 pair of shoes, I'm getting $6.50 from Chase and $2 from Rakuten. My $100 shoes are $91.50 before I've done anything but shop at I normally would.
Get $15 off your first Allbirds purchase of $100 or more, on me.