Card portals

Some of the biggest shopping portals are not standalone sites at all. They sit inside a credit card account: Chase and Barclays each run one, paying in that bank's own points rather than cash, and American Express lets you take its points instead of cashback through a partner portal.

They earn the way every shopping portal does, by paying you for starting your purchase there and taking a share of what the store pays for the referral. What makes them behave differently is that their rates can depend on which card you hold, so two people looking at the same store in the same bank portal can be shown different numbers.

The Chase portal is the one we track, as two entries, Chase Freedom and Chase Sapphire: every card in the Freedom family is shown the first set of rates, and every card in the Sapphire family the second. You still need your own Chase login to click through, but you can check the rates here first.

The posts in this topic cover what each of the big card portals pays in, how bank points differ from cashback in ways that go past the exchange rate, when a card portal is likely to be the better click, and the Amex route that pays points through an ordinary cashback portal.

Where we cannot read a rate we say so rather than estimating it. Amex Offers is the clearest case: American Express adds those to each account individually, so there is no number that is true for everyone and we do not publish one.