Cashback portals 101

What a shopping portal actually is

A shopping portal is a website that pays you for starting your online shopping there. Click through the portal to a store, buy what you were going to buy anyway, and the portal credits you cash, airline miles, or credit card points.

There's no magic: stores pay affiliate commissions for referred sales, and portals hand part of that commission back to you. That's also why rates differ so much between portals - each one decides how much of its commission to share, store by store, week by week.

The three families

• Cashback portals (TopCashback, Rakuten, BeFrugal, Mr. Rebates…) pay cash - the simplest math.
• Airline mileage portals (AAdvantage eShopping, MileagePlus Shopping, SkyMiles Shopping…) pay miles per dollar, e.g. 3 mi/$. Most of them run on one of a few shared platforms, but each has its own stores and rates.
• Card-linked portals (Shop through Chase, Rakuten's Amex Membership Rewards mode…) pay transferable credit-card points.

Which family "pays best" depends entirely on what a mile or point is worth to you - which is why this site shows rates in native units, meaning miles as miles and points as points, never silently converted into dollars. Any dollar conversion here is an explicit, adjustable assumption, never a fact.

Why you should check before you shop

The same store can pay 2% on one portal and 10% on another, on the same afternoon. Rates jump around constantly - that's not a bug, it's the business model. Two habits capture most of the value:

1. Compare across portals for the store you're buying from - that's the search box here.
2. Notice when a rate is unusually high for itself. 8% might be ordinary for one store and the highest we've ever seen for another. Our verdicts and the rate highs page exist for exactly this.

Stacking, briefly

Portal earnings stack with everything else. A full stack might look like:

store promo/coupon + portal rate + credit-card earning + card-linked offer (+ gift-card angles for the advanced crowd)

The portal doesn't care which card you pay with, so a card that earns well on online shopping multiplies the trip. One warning: your portal cashback can be voided by coupon codes the portal didn't list - when in doubt, use only the store promos shown inside the portal.

The gotchas nobody puts on the homepage

• Tracking is fragile. Ad blockers, cross-site cookie settings, and wandering off to a coupon site mid-checkout are the classic ways to lose the cashback entirely. Click through the portal last, in a clean tab, ideally in an incognito/private window.
• "Up to X%" is a ceiling, not a promise. The headline rate often applies to one category; check the store page fine print.
• A boosted rate expires. A boosted rate is the ordinary rate temporarily raised above its usual level, and on airline portals especially it is real value but short-lived. Where a portal publishes the date one stops, we show that date on the rate; otherwise its own tracked history is the guide.
• Payouts take time. Cash portals typically confirm purchases in days but pay out in weeks-to-months; miles usually post within a statement cycle or two.
• Promos/discount codes are tricky. Using a promo/discount code that's not published by the portal you're using will likely invalidate cashback.

Where this site fits

We track the rates across portals so the checking takes seconds: search a store, see every portal's current rate in native units, see whether today's number is actually good for that store, and - if you make an account - get an email when a store you care about goes up. Start with the portal directory or just search the store you're about to buy from, and keep the glossary open if a word here is new.