Free Points

Updated 11/24/23 to include a Capital One referral link that can earn you $50!

The holiday season is here and a lot of us prefer to do our shopping online. That provides us a great opportunity to double-dip on earning points, miles or cash back through the use of shopping portals! To make things easier, in this post I’ll just refer to “earning points” but know that I’m using that phrase to cover earning hotel points (e.g. Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott), credit card points (e.g. Chase Ultimate Rewards (URs), Amex Membership Rewards (MRs)), airline miles (e.g. American, Delta, United) or cash back.

Cash Back Monitor

My first stop is usually Cash Back Monitor. This is an incredible free tool that will show you which shopping portals have the best discounts on that day for the store you want to shop. Note that Amazon rarely has deals for hotel or credit card points or airline miles but sometimes offers good deals for cash back.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you need a gift for a pet so you can enter PetSmart in the “Search Store Here” box. Here’s a list of the current cash back and points & miles offerings:

You can earn up to 15% cash back if you shop through Rakuten. Or you may choose 7 American Airlines AAdvantage miles per dollar (when it’s usually just 1 mile per dollar). But maybe 8 Chase Ultimate Reward points is more your preference – but note that you must have one of the Chase Freedom cards. The Chase Ink and Sapphire cards, which also earn URs, are only earning 6x or 5x respectively. You’ll also see Rakuten listed in the “Other Reward Points” category. That’s because if you have an Amex card that earns their Membership Rewards points, you can choose to earn those points instead of cash back. Why would you want to do that? Because if you play your cards right you can transfer those MR points to an airline and effectively get better than a 1% return.

If you don’t have accounts with any of the cash back portals, one thing to consider is their cash-out policy. Some portals have a minimum cash-out value so it may take quite awhile to accumulate enough cash back to do that. Others may only let you redeem the cash back for gift cards. So do your research first before jumping at the first big number.

Once you decide which option you’d like to choose you can click the link right there on the Cash Back Monitor page and it will take you to the appropriate shopping portal. Note that, unless it’s specified, you don’t necessarily have to use a co-branded credit card to earn the bonus! As an example, if you choose to go through the American Airlines shopping portal, you don’t have to use the AA co-branded credit card to get the 7x miles. But if you choose the United shopping portal, you’ll only get the 6x points if you use the UA credit card. If you don’t, you’ll only get 4x points. Either way that’s still better than the half-point per dollar you’d normally get.

NOTE: be aware that if you use a coupon code that is not publicly available, you may not receive credit for shopping through a portal.  Sometimes it works if, say, the retailer advertises a code for free shipping on their site.  But if you were sent an email with a special code for free shipping, then you may not be eligible for the points through the portal.

Extend the Life of Your Miles

While some frequent flyer programs like Delta SkyMiles, Southwest Rapid Rewards and United MileagePlus have done away with mileage expiration dates, many other airlines require periodic activity in your mileage account to keep your miles from expiring.  The team at The Points Guy has put together a handy chart to let you know if and when your miles expire.  The good news is that many programs, like American AAdvantage and British Airways Avios, will allow you to extend the life of your miles with activity.  And having miles credited to your frequent flyer account for going through their shopping portal qualifies as activity to extend your miles!

Browser Extensions

One more trick is to install browser extensions. I have a couple installed on my regular browser. The Rakuten extension pops up any time you visit a website where you can earn points through Rakuten. All you have to do is click the purple button and it will temporarily show another page where it’s linking your Rakuten account with this shopping session. Note that if you close the tab or the browser window – or even go to a different website in this same tab – you’ll need to click the purple button again when you return to the shopping site to ensure it’s tracking your purchase.

Rakuten browser extension on the PetSmart website

The second extension I have installed is the Capital One shopping extension. This extension comes into play when you start the checkout process. Almost every site has a box where you can enter a coupon code. If Capital One has any coupon codes valid for the site you’re visiting, it will ask if you would like to try the codes and if you agree, it will try them all for you, one by one. This is a cool way to find some unexpected savings and you don’t even have to be a Capital One customer to use it!

Get $50 back through Capitol One shopping!

Here’s a bonus! Join Capitol One shopping by 12/1/23 and make purchases totaling $10 or more in the first 30 days after joining and you’ll get $50 added to your Capitol One rewards! Full disclosure, I’ll get $50 too. To join, just use my link: capitaloneshopping.com/r/6R7G5TV

In the end

There are lots of ways to save money and/or earn bonus points this holiday season. Hopefully these tips will help.