Does a shopping portal purchase count toward minimum spend?

In practice, yes. A shopping portal (a site that pays you cashback, miles, or points for starting your purchase there) sits in front of the store, not between your card and your bank. Your bank sees an ordinary purchase at that store for the full amount, so it counts toward a welcome offer's minimum spend exactly like any other swipe, and the portal pays you separately on top of it when the purchase tracks.

That is the whole answer. This is spend you were making anyway, and it earns from two directions at once.

Why it counts: the portal isn't in the payment path

A portal is a referral, not a payment processor. You click through it, land on the store's own site, and check out on the store's own checkout with your own card. The charge that reaches your card issuer says the store's name, for the full price you paid, on the date you paid it. Nothing in that transaction records which link you arrived through.

The cashback is a separate event entirely. It happens weeks later, in your portal account, funded by the store's affiliate commission (what the store pays the portal for sending you the sale), and it never touches the original charge. That's also why portal cashback doesn't reduce the amount the bank counts: you paid $400, the bank saw $400, and the $20 shows up in a different place later. The full mechanics of portal-plus-card stacking are here.

No issuer publishes a sentence saying portal purchases count toward a welcome bonus, in either direction. What they publish is two things that add up to it. First, the exclusion lists are lists of transaction types, and none of Chase's, American Express's or Citi's names shopping portals, affiliate links or cashback sites. Second, Chase describes its own shopping portal as directing you to the store's website, where you shop as normal. A purchase made on the store's own site with your own card is a normal transaction for minimum spend too.

This is different from the thing people confuse it with. Booking through a bank's own travel portal is a purchase made on the bank's booking site, and that has its own rules. A shopping portal is not that.

The same purchase earning two ways

Here's what "on top" looks like in practice. Take a purchase most people put on a new credit card early: a TV. This is what the best-paying portals we track are paying at Best Buy right now (check each portal's exclusions first, since several skip laptops and Apple products):

A $1,000 order on that store puts $1,000 toward the minimum spend, earns whatever your card pays per dollar, and earns the portal rate on top of both. The three layers come from three different places, and your card issuer never sees which portal link you clicked.

Worth checking the rate is any good before you assume it's worth the click, though. Rates on any given store swing wildly, and today's number only means something next to that store's own history.

What actually doesn't count toward minimum spend

The carve-outs are real, and they have nothing to do with portals. We read the published terms for Chase's Sapphire Preferred, American Express's Platinum and Citi's Strata Premier in August 2026, and the same categories show up in all three:

• Balance transfers and cash advances. Excluded everywhere, in every set of terms we read.
• Cash-like transactions. Money orders, wire transfers, traveler's checks, foreign currency, casino chips and lottery tickets. Chase also names cryptocurrency outright; Chase and Amex both name person-to-person money transfers.
• Fees and interest, including the annual fee. This is the one that catches people. Chase's terms exclude fees of any kind and name the annual fee specifically; Amex's exclude fees and interest charges. Paying a $95 or $895 annual fee does not move you $95 or $895 closer to the bonus, even though it's a charge on the account.
• Returns and refunds. Chase and Citi both define qualifying spend as purchases minus returns and refunds, so a refunded purchase is deducted from your qualifying spend.

One issuer is a genuine outlier worth naming: American Express explicitly excludes gift card purchases from the spending requirement, along with prepaid cards. Chase and Citi do not name gift cards in their lists. And Capital One is the awkward one, because it publishes no comparable exclusion list on its offer pages at all, so what counts there has to be read out of the customer agreement's definition of cash advances.

Read your own offer's terms rather than a list on any site, ours included. The exclusions vary by issuer and by card, and they change.

Does a return cancel out spend already made?

Yes, it reduces it. Chase and Citi both define qualifying spend as purchases minus returns and refunds, so a $500 return subtracts $500 from your running total. Amex goes further and lists returning purchases you made to hit the threshold as an example of the kind of gaming that can cost you the points, or the account. The practical version: don't count a purchase you might send back.

Does the annual fee count toward the minimum spend?

No. Chase's terms exclude fees of any kind and name the annual fee; Amex's exclude fees and interest charges. The fee posts to the account, so it shows up in your balance and looks like spending, which is exactly why people miss deadlines over it. It is not a purchase.

Gift cards to hit the spend: three separate problems

Buying gift cards is the classic shortcut for closing a spend gap, and it carries three distinct risks that get muddled into one.

It may not count. American Express excludes gift card purchases from the spending requirement outright, and has enforced it: Doctor of Credit documented Amex invalidating welcome bonuses over gift card runs in 2017, then adding gift cards to the ineligible-purchase language across several cards in 2019. Chase and Citi don't name gift cards, which is not the same as blessing them.

It may be repriced. Issuers' published terms can treat a gift card purchase as a cash advance, which carries a fee and no grace period and may earn no rewards at all. Check your own card's terms. Whether it codes that way depends on the store and the card, and you find out on the statement.

The portal usually pays nothing. This is the predictable one. Rakuten's own help pages say most gift cards are excluded from cashback, with a few exceptions. Paying with a gift card is the mirror problem: using one typically invalidates portal cashback, though not always, so check the portal's terms for that store first. Airline portal promotion terms exclude gift cards as cash equivalents too.

So the gift card play can lose on all three fronts at once, which is why it comes up so often and works so rarely.

What to do with this

1. Don't change what you buy. The point of this is that the spend was already happening. A minimum spend deadline is a bad reason to buy something you didn't want.
2. Check the store before you check out. Look it up on the Best Buy page or any other store page and you'll see what each portal pays and whether today's rate is good for that store. The click costs nothing and the charge to your card is identical either way.
3. Keep the order confirmation. Portal cashback takes weeks to come through, and a missing-cashback claim will ask for it.
4. Read your offer's own terms for the exclusions. Especially on the annual fee and returns, which are where the near-misses happen.

The full stack has more layers than these two: portal, card, card-linked offer, store loyalty, coupon, applied in that order.