New to points? Start on the earn side

To earn points when you shop online, start with a shopping portal: you click through it before you check out, and it pays you part of what the store pays for sending you. There are three ways ordinary people earn points and miles: everyday card spend, a card's welcome offer, and shopping portals. Only the third needs no new card and no credit check, and it pays on purchases you were already making. We track 44 portals that do it.

Most beginner guides open on the card side. This one opens on the layer most of them skip.

The three ways people actually earn points and miles

Everything in this hobby is a variation on three things: you earn a small percentage on every purchase you put on a rewards card, you earn a large lump sum once for meeting a card's opening spend requirement, and you earn a separate reward for starting your online shopping at a portal. The three don't compete. They stack on the same purchase.

• Card spend. Your credit card pays you back on what you buy, in cash or in the card's own currency. It's automatic, it's small, and it's the same on every purchase.
• Welcome offers. A card pays a large one-time bonus for spending a set amount in your first few months. This is where most of the big point balances people talk about come from. It's also the part that involves a credit application and a hard credit check, so it's the part to understand slowly rather than first.
• Shopping portals. A shopping portal is a site you click through on your way to a store. The store pays the portal a commission for sending you, and the portal hands you part of it, in cash, airline miles, or points. Same store, same price, extra reward.

Those are different products, and we don't rank their rates against each other. A one-time bonus is one payment for one qualifying spend; an earn rate pays on every order forever. Comparing the two numbers head to head is the most common beginner mistake in this space.

Why portals are the zero-cost place to start

Shopping through a portal doesn't touch your credit. You make an account with an email address, click a store's link before you buy, and the reward usually shows up weeks to months later, after the store confirms the sale. There's no application, no annual fee, and no minimum spend. The worst case is that a purchase fails to track and you're back where you started. The one way to lose money is buying something you didn't need, which the traps below cover.

That low downside is why we say start here. Every other earning method asks you to change a decision: which card to carry, which card to open, how much to spend by when. A portal asks you to add one click to a purchase you already decided on.

Here's what that click is worth at a store most people buy from. These are the top cashback rows for Best Buy, best-first:

The spread in that table is why the choice matters. It's the same store and the same price on every row, and the reward varies by a lot depending on which door you walked through.

Do you need a credit card to use a shopping portal?

No, for nearly every portal. A portal pays you for the click-through, not for how you pay. A free loyalty account or an email address is the whole requirement, and airline portals work the same way: you need the frequent flyer account, not the airline's credit card. You can pay with a debit card and still get paid. The exception is the bank-run malls, like Shop through Chase, which sit behind your bank login.

How much do portals actually pay?

It depends entirely on the store, and the range is wide. Electronics often crawl along at 1% or less on the products most people buy, because the store's own margin is thin. Apparel, beauty and travel bookings often pay several times that. The "up to" ceilings in the Best Buy table above often carry exclusions on big-ticket items like Apple products and laptops, so read the exclusions before you count on one.

The highest rates we're tracking right now

These stores are at or near the highest rate we've tracked for them, as of each portal's latest check (cashback only - the full highs page covers airline miles and points too):

The four traps that eat a beginner's first year

• Assuming the portal you signed up for is the best one. It often isn't, for any given store. The leader changes by store and by week, so check the current one before you buy.
• Losing the credit to something small. An ad blocker, a second tab, or an outside coupon code can quietly break the tracking on a purchase that otherwise looked perfect. That failure mode has more variations than anyone expects, and the traps are worth reading before your first big order.
• Reading "up to 10%" as 10%. That phrase usually means one narrow category pays 10% and everything else pays 2%. We badge those rates so you can tell a ceiling from what you'll actually earn.
• Letting a rate create a purchase. Cashback is a discount on spending, not income. Buying a $200 thing you didn't need to get $20 back is losing $180. The math on when cashback is worth the effort goes deeper.

What to do this week

1. Pick a purchase you were going to make anyway. Not a new one. This whole thing only works on spending that was already happening.
2. Look the store up before you buy. Find it on the stores page and you'll see what every portal we track pays, plus whether today's number is good for that store's own history.
3. Sign up for whichever portal is leading for that store, click through it, and buy in the same tab without wandering off.
4. Screenshot the order confirmation. If the cashback doesn't appear, that screenshot shows the order date, amount and confirmation number a missing-cashback claim asks for.
5. Then, and only then, look at the card layers. Once portals are a habit, stacking a card and a card-linked offer on top is the natural next step. When the terms allow it, the same purchase can pay you from more than one direction, and each layer has its own terms to check.

Do that once and the mechanics stop being abstract. Then set an alert on that store so you hear when its rate moves before your next order.