The shopping-portal glossary: every term decoded

Shopping portals come with their own dialect, and most of it is simple once someone just defines the words. This glossary decodes every term you'll run into on this site, from click-through to up-to rates to claim windows, in plain English. Bookmark it and skim as needed.

The core terms

Shopping portal. A site, app, or extension that pays you a reward for clicking through it before you buy online. Cashback portals 101 has the full picture.

Click through. Starting at the portal and clicking its link to reach the store. This sets the tracking cookie. If you don't click through, you don't earn.

Tracking cookie. The small file that ties your purchase back to the portal so you get credit. Ad blockers, incognito mode, and tabbing away can break it. Not sure if yours did? Run the 60-second check.

Commission. What a store pays for being sent a customer, normally a slice of your order. It is the money this whole system runs on: the store pays the portal a commission, and the portal hands you most of it as your rate. Thin margins mean a thin commission, which is why some categories can never pay much. How the model actually holds together.

Pending vs confirmed. Your cashback shows as pending first, then confirmed (payable) once the store's return window passes, commonly 3 to 14 weeks, longer for travel. Pending is normal, not a problem.

Rate terms

Cashback (%). A percentage of your spend returned as money.

Miles per dollar (mi/$). Airline-portal earning: miles per dollar spent. Not the same thing as a percentage, so read the units.

Points per dollar (pts/$). Points-portal earning, in the portal's own currency or a card program's.

Boosted rate. A rate temporarily raised above its usual level, normally to win clicks during a sale. It ends and the rate drops back. Portals describe the same idea a few ways, most often calling it "elevated" or a "boost"; it's one idea with different labels.

"Ends Aug 9". Some portals publish the date a boosted rate stops. Where they do, we put that date on the category it applies to. Where they don't, we don't guess: nearly every portal rate is temporary, so a bare "limited time" label would tell you nothing.

Highest yet. The chip we put on a rate sitting at the top of what we have recorded for that store on that portal. One label covers two scopes: the highest we have ever tracked for it, or the highest in the past year. Hover the chip and the tooltip says which. It is the label worth acting on, because it grades a rate against its own past rather than against whatever the portal is promoting today. Near high is the same idea one notch down: close to the top of that range, not quite at it. See what's sitting there right now on Rate highs.

Typical. The band a store's rate normally sits in, based on its own tracked history: a muted "Typical" chip, and "typical range 4–6%" in prose. It's the yardstick every verdict below grades today's rate against, so a rate that's merely ordinary still gets a fair, undramatic label instead of no label at all.

"Up to". A maximum rate that applies to some category, not a guarantee for your whole order. The most-skimmed, most-important phrase.

Stale. A rate we haven't confirmed recently, so it might be out of date. We label it so you can double-check before relying on it.

Verdict. The one-sentence answer to "is this rate any good?" that sits at the top of a store page (the exact math). It compares today's number against that store's own tracked history on that portal, never against another store and never against another program's points. Where a store's history is too short to back up a high-or-typical read, the verdict says so plainly instead of guessing at one.

Bonus terms

One-time bonus. The badge you'll actually see on this site. A fixed one-time bonus for a qualifying purchase, not a rate on what you spend. Usually limited to one per account, and often restricted to new customers. Because it doesn't scale with your order, we never rank it against a per-dollar earn rate: they answer different questions. The two shapes below are the ones you'll meet in the wild.

First-purchase bonus. A one-time bonus for new members of a portal, paid on a first qualifying purchase.

Spend bonus. A one-time bonus for crossing a spending threshold ("spend $100, get 1,000 bonus miles"). When you see people call a bonus "funded," they mean the airline or the store is paying for it rather than the portal, which is usually why one runs for a short window and then vanishes.

Strategy terms

Stacking / double dip. Earning from multiple sources on one purchase: portal cashback plus credit-card rewards (plus sometimes a card-linked offer and a coupon). How to stack.

Card-linked offer. A store offer you activate in your card account (Amex Offers, Chase Offers) that can pay on top of the portal.

Missing cashback claim. The process for getting credited when a purchase doesn't track. Keep your order confirmation; most well-documented claims get approved.

Claim window. The deadline the portal sets for filing that claim, counted from the purchase date. Miss it and the claim is closed before it is read.

Claim tracker. Our tool for keeping claims straight: what you filed, with which portal, how long the claim window has left, and the screenshots you will be asked for.

Click receipt. The record we save when you click through from here: the store, the portal, the rate we were showing you, the terms, and the time. It is our record of what you were promised, cross-checked against the rate we had stored, so you have something concrete to quote in a claim. It is not proof the portal registered your click, and it can't be. Only the portal can tell you that, in its own shopping-trip history.

Portal aggregator / comparison tool. A site (like this one) that shows a store's rate across many portals at once, so you can pick the best.

Seeing it in practice

Here's a live rate table with several of these terms in play. Spot the "up to" and "stale" tags:

New to all this? Start with cashback portals 101, then how to tell if a rate is good.