Cashback basics

A shopping portal is a site that pays you for starting your online purchase there. You click through the portal to a store, buy what you were going to buy anyway, and the portal pays you cashback, airline miles, or points. Same store, same checkout, same price.

That is the whole idea, and everything in this topic is the practical version of it. What a portal actually is and how one makes money. Why the same store can pay 2% on one portal and 10% on another on the same day. What "up to 8%" really means when you read it on a portal page. How long the money takes to arrive, why it sits as pending for weeks first, and what has to happen before a portal will actually pay you. Which categories rarely pay well, and why electronics is the usual example.

Start here if you have never clicked through a portal before, or if you have used one for years and never quite worked out why the numbers move the way they do. Nothing here assumes you already know the vocabulary. Where a term needs defining, it gets defined on the spot.

The payoff is small on any one order and it adds up over a year of shopping you were doing regardless. One extra click, on the purchases you were placing anyway.