The shopping-portal glossary: every term decoded

This shopping portal glossary explains the cashback terms you'll meet on a portal or store page: click through, up to, pending, stacking, and mi/$. Shopping portals are sites that pay you a reward for starting your purchase on them, and each entry below is one short plain-English definition, so skim to the term you're stuck on.

The core shopping portal 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. Without the click, the portal usually can't credit your purchase.

Tracking cookie. The small file that ties your purchase back to the portal so you get credit. Ad blockers, a second click on the store, and outside coupon codes can break it. An incognito window often avoids blockers, though not always. 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 rarely pay much. How cashback portals make their money.

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 [date]". 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 show no date, since many portal rates are temporary and a bare "limited time" label would tell you little.

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 grades a rate against that store's own past on that portal, not against whatever the portal is promoting today. It says nothing about whether another portal pays more for the same store, so compare portals on the store's page. Near high is the same idea one notch down: close to the highest we have tracked for that store on that portal in the past year, but 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.

Best category. The muted marker on a demoted "up to" rate, such as "best category 3%". It is the rate for one category, not your whole order.

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 (how we decide a rate is good). It compares today's number against that store's own tracked history, never against another store and never against another program's points. A "highest we've seen" line appears only when no portal has paid more for that store. Where a store's history is too short to back up a high-or-typical read, the verdict says so plainly.

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. These often run for a short window, so check the end date.

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.

Transferable points / transfer partner. Card points you can move into an airline or hotel program, at the card issuer's own conversion rate, instead of redeeming them inside the card program. The program you move them to is the transfer partner.

Membership Rewards (MR). American Express's points currency. Link an Amex card enrolled in Membership Rewards to your Rakuten account and Rakuten pays MR points instead of cash, one point per dollar spent for each percent of cashback (so 6% becomes 6 points per dollar).

Ultimate Rewards (UR). Chase's points currency, earned on the Freedom and Sapphire families of cards, including through Shop through Chase, the portal Chase runs for those cardholders.

Missing cashback claim. The process for getting credited when a purchase doesn't track. Keep your order confirmation, since a claim will ask for it.

Claim window. The deadline a portal sets for filing that claim. Some count it from the purchase, others from when the transaction completed, and some publish none. Past a portal's limit a claim may not be reviewed, so file early.

Purchase tracker. Our tool for keeping missing-cashback claims straight: which purchases you're chasing, with which portal, how long the claim window has left, and the screenshots you will be asked for.

Click receipt. Once you turn on click receipts in your account, the record we save each time you click through from a store page here: the store, the portal, the rate we were showing you, the terms, and the time. It is our record of the rate we showed you, 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 rate for the store you're buying from.

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. The rest of the beginner-level writing sits under the Cashback basics topic.