How to Use Shopping Portals

One of the easiest ways to maximize your savings on Black Friday and Cyber Monday — aside from using a rewards credit card — is to take advantage of a shopping portal.

These sites offer additional cash back, miles or flexible travel rewards when you sign up for an account and click through the portal to the retailer’s site before finalizing your purchase. For the most part, it’s that simple; however, there are caveats to be aware of so you don’t negate your bonus rewards.

To help boost your savings, here’s the shopping portal I’m leaning into this holiday shopping season (Rakuten) and my favorite tool for ensuring I’m choosing the best portal for every purchase (Savewise).

The first part of this equation is easy to solve with portal search tools such as Cashback Monitor or Savewise. These sites let you quickly compare shopping portal rates with the click of a button.

I prefer to use Savewise because it also shows you if there are card-linked offers for the merchant you’re searching for, in addition to the best shopping portal rates. The free version allows you to sync your Amex Offers and Chase Offers, so you know exactly what offers are available to you for each merchant. With a paid Pro membership, you can also sync AAdvantage SimplyMiles offers and Citi Offers and automatically activate these card-linked deals.

While it’s easy to compare rates between portals, you have to look one step deeper to compare value. Certain portals have minimum payout requirements, and if you don’t earn enough to get paid, your rewards effectively drop to zero. Utilize portals you see yourself frequenting now and in the future.

Portals also earn different types of rewards. Cash back portals are the most straightforward, and airline and bank portals earn rewards within that specific program. Travel rewards can be more valuable than cash back, as long as you’re aware of its incremental value.

To book a flight, you typically need at least thousands of miles. If you only earn 500 or 1,000 miles through an airline portal, that means those rewards are worthless until you can increase your balance. In other words, if you don’t have bigger travel rewards balances, cash back is more practical.

The shopping portal I use most often is Rakuten. I like it so much, I often use it even when it doesn’t offer the highest return. This is because Rakuten allows you to earn cash back, Bilt Rewards Points or Amex Membership Rewards® (if you have an Amex card that earns Membership Rewards®).

Rakuten’s recent Bilt Rewards partnership is what puts it over the top for me. Bilt has what I consider to be the best list of transfer partners of any flexible travel rewards program, and for the first six months, you can convert Rakuten rewards to Bilt Rewards at a 1:1 ratio. (After six months, it drops to 0.5:1 unless you have Bilt elite status.) I’m particularly interested in the option to convert Bilt Points into World of Hyatt points (it has a valuable fixed award chart) and Atmos Rewards, which is the new loyalty program for Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines.

You can book a Standard night at a Category 1 Hyatt hotel for only 5,000 Hyatt points, which is the equivalent of $50 in Rakuten rewards. That’s a great deal for hotels that can cost $125 a night or more. I also have a large Atmos Rewards balance, and Bilt is the only major travel rewards program that partners with Atmos. If I don’t have enough Atmos points to book the flights I want, I’ll use Bilt Points to close the gap. This type of versatility adds value that’s hard to capture in numbers.

The option to earn Bilt Points through Rakuten has also given a subtle boost to The Rakuten American Express® Card. It now earns more Bilt Points than the Bilt Mastercard® on groceries and gives you an extra 4% cash back on up to $7,000 in credit card spending each calendar year (then 1% back) on Rakuten purchases (with the same 1:1 conversion ratio). This is on top of the cash back you’ll earn for shopping through the platform.

The Bilt Mastercard isn’t currently available to new applicants as Bilt revamps its card lineup. In Jan. 2026, there will be three new Bilt cards, which may knock the Rakuten Amex Card down a bit.

Read all of the terms, not just for the portal you’re using, but also for that specific merchant or purchase. For certain brands, only specific items or categories of items may be eligible for rewards. Also, while most portals allow you to pay with any credit or debit card and earn rewards, that’s not always the case. Shopping portals associated with a bank’s rewards program may require you to use a card issued by that bank to be eligible for the bonus rewards.

Many rewards portals also have unusually long payout times (Rakuten pays out quarterly). On top of that, it can take weeks for rewards to go from pending to payable. So don’t expect to earn a chunk of cash back over Black Friday and Cyber Monday and use it to buy last-minute Christmas gifts.

• 1.5% cash back by paying with my Chase Freedom Unlimited® card (see rates and fees)
• $10 cash back for spending $50+ at Chewy using a Chase Offer linked to my Freedom Unlimited card
• 10X Bilt Points through Rakuten (Savewise showed a 4%/4X return, but my Rakuten account was targeted for a better offer)

Chewy also offers free shipping on all $49+ orders, which lined up perfectly with my Chase Offer’s spending requirement. Obviously, I’m not retiring early by maximizing my rewards on cat supplies, but you can see how this strategy adds up over time and how it could be especially valuable when making big purchases or spending a lot around the holidays.

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