Card-linked offers vs shopping portals: swipe vs click

Two rewards that look alike track in completely different ways. Card-linked offers (Amex Offers, Chase Offers, Citi Merchant Offers) track by the card transaction: add the offer, pay with that card, done. Shopping portals track by the click, which is how all 44 portals we compare pay on an online order. Nearly every mix-up about which one broke comes down to that difference.

Card-linked offers track by the swipe

The bank already knows you bought something, because it processed the payment. The offer is attached to the card, so the only two things that matter are whether you added the offer beforehand and whether you paid with that card.

Each issuer says as much in its own words. American Express: "To redeem an Amex Offer, you must first add it to your eligible American Express Card before making a qualifying purchase," then "use that same enrolled Card to make a qualifying purchase directly with the participating merchant." Chase's own Offers page is blunter: choose an offer, add it to your card, pay with that eligible card, and the statement credit follows, with "No coupons or codes required." Citi Merchant Offers are also added one card at a time; read each offer's terms for how its credit posts.

Do you have to deactivate your cashback browser extensions?

For a true card-linked offer, no. Capital One offers are where this question usually starts, and for the card-linked half of that program browser extensions have nothing to touch (the online half is a different animal, covered below). Card-linked offers don't rely on a browser cookie, so extensions and tabs have no normal way to override the credit. An ad blocker, a coupon extension, a second tab, a different browser, even shopping on your phone and paying in a store: none of it changes whether the swipe qualifies.

Shopping portals track by the click

A portal earns nothing from your bank. It gets paid because the store's affiliate program credits it for sending you, and the credit goes to whoever sent the last click before checkout. That's why clicking through is a hard requirement and why the click is fragile: anything that lands a newer click, or blocks the portal's cookie from being set at all, takes the payment somewhere else. The mechanism is worth understanding once, and then most of this becomes obvious: last-click attribution, and everything that can steal the click.

So the failure modes are entirely different. A card-linked offer fails because you forgot to activate it or paid with the wrong card. A portal purchase fails because something got between the click and the checkout.

Capital One is both, which is why it confuses people

Capital One runs two separate things with confusingly similar names, and one of them is a hybrid.

Capital One Offers, in the card app, is part card-linked and part click-through. For in-store use, Capital One's own instructions are card-linked: activate the offer before you buy, then pay with the same Capital One card. For online use, they're click-based: Capital One's terms ask you to buy on the store's site in the same open browser session the offer launched, and within 24 hours of activating it. That online half behaves exactly like a portal, so extensions and stray tabs really can break it.

Capital One Shopping is a different product: a full cashback portal with a browser extension, which we track like any other. You can see what it pays and how often we confirm it on its Capital One Shopping portal page. It is a cashback portal that happens to pay out in gift cards, not a card-linked offer.

If you're comparing a card-linked offer against a portal on the same store, the portal side is easy to check. Here's the top of the field on Macy's, from our live rate table:

What breaks each kind

A true card-linked offer only breaks at the moment you pay: either the card is wrong or the offer was never added. Portal cashback can break anywhere between the click and the confirmation page, which is a much longer stretch of road. That is why the right-hand column below is the busy one. The table covers true card-linked offers, the kind that work in store; Capital One's online offers follow the portal column instead.

Read down the two columns and the practical rule falls out: the things you'd worry about for one are irrelevant to the other, and the only row where both go wrong at once is the gift card.

All three layers stack

None of this is a choice between the two. A card-linked offer, a portal, and your card's own earn rate are three separate payers who don't know about each other, so a single order can pay you from all three. Portal plus card is the core double dip; the card-linked offer sits on top as a third layer with its own terms. The stacking guide walks the rest, in the order to apply them. Worth checking what each program's own terms allow before you plan around it, especially if two offers from the same bank would apply to one purchase.

The one gap: Amex Offers are added to each card account individually, so there's no rate anyone can publish that would be true for you. Chase's own shopping portal is different, and we do track that, split by card family.

What to do before your next order

1. Open your card app and add any offer that matches the store. It takes a few seconds, and after that extensions, coupon codes and stray tabs can't touch it. Paying with a different card, or partly with a gift card, can. (Capital One's online offers are the exception: they follow the portal rules above.)
2. Then check the portals for that store and click through from the winner.
3. Buy in that same tab, with the card carrying the offer, without pasting in an outside code.

Do those in that order and the offer and the portal both pay, on top of your card's own earn rate. Start at the store you're actually buying from and you'll see the portal side in one look.