Airline shopping portals, explained

If you collect airline miles, there's a good chance the easiest miles you'll ever earn come from shopping you were going to do anyway. Nearly every US airline runs a shopping portal — a mall of online stores you click through before you buy, which then pays you miles for the purchase. This guide covers what they are, how to read their rates, and the one thing almost nobody tells you: most of them are the same store underneath.

What an airline shopping portal actually is

It's an affiliate storefront wearing an airline's colors. The airline (really, a partner that runs the mall for them) has an affiliate relationship with thousands of retailers. When you start at the portal, click through to a store, and buy, the store pays the portal a commission — and the portal hands you part of that back as miles in your frequent-flyer account instead of cash.

That's the whole trick. You're not getting a discount; you're getting miles funded by the retailer's marketing budget, on top of everything else you'd normally earn.

Why the rate is "miles per dollar," not a percentage

Cashback sites quote a percentage because they pay you cash. Airline portals quote miles per dollar — 2 mi/$, 4 mi/$, sometimes more — because they pay you miles, not cash. A store showing 4 mi/$ pays exactly that: four miles for every dollar you spend, so a $100 order earns 400 miles. There's no percentage to translate.

Whether that's a good deal depends entirely on what a mile is worth to you, and that's a personal number — a Southwest point and an Emirates mile are not the same thing, and neither is worth a fixed cent. We never quietly convert miles to dollars for you; when we show a cents-per-point assumption anywhere on the site, it's a slider you control, not a fact.

Here's one store's airline-portal rates side by side, live:

The part nobody mentions: it's mostly one platform

Click through United's mall, then American's, then Delta's. The layout feels familiar. The store list feels familiar. That's not déjà vu — most US airline shopping portals run on the same underlying platform (Cartera Commerce). The airlines license it, paint it their color, and plug in their own miles.

This has two real consequences:

• The catalogs rhyme. If a store is on one airline mall, it's usually on the others. So "which portal has this store?" is rarely the question.
• The rates and the miles still differ. Same platform does not mean same numbers. Each airline sets its own rate for each store and pays in its own currency. The question that matters is "which mall pays the most miles I actually value today?" — and that changes store by store, day by day.

Because we track 41 portals in one place, you don't have to open a dozen tabs to answer that. Across the major airline malls, here's how one store's rate has moved lately:

Miles or cash? A quick way to decide

For any given purchase you can usually earn either miles (through an airline portal) or cash (through a cashback portal). A rough, honest way to choose:

• Take the cash when you don't have a near-term use for the miles, or when the cash rate is clearly generous. Cash is flexible and never devalues overnight.
• Take the miles when you're saving toward a specific award and value those miles above what you'd pay to buy them — and remember airline miles can be devalued by the airline at any time, which cash can't.

There's no universal winner. That's exactly why we show both in their native units and let you judge. If you want the mechanics of how cashback tracking works before you rely on it, read when cashback doesn't track; if portals are new to you, start with cashback portals 101.