How it works

Shopping portals pay you for starting your shopping trip on their site. There are many portals, and they all give you different cashback rates on your purchases. We check dozens of portals for you, and tell you which one pays you most today. Portals pay you in cashback or airline miles, on the shopping you are already doing.

What you do, in four steps

1. 1 Search the store you're about to buy from.
2. 2 See every portal's current rate side by side: cashback, airline miles, and points, each shown in its own currency.
3. 3 Read the verdict. We compare today's rate to that store's own tracked history and say, in plain English, whether it's actually a good rate or just a Tuesday.
4. 4 Click through the portal that pays you most, and shop.

What a shopping portal actually is

Stores pay a commission to websites that send them shoppers. A shopping portal is a site that splits that commission with you: as cashback (Rakuten and TopCashback are the big ones), airline miles (every major airline runs one, like the American Airlines eStore), or credit-card points.

Using one takes about five extra seconds, and joining is free. The only difference is that your purchase now also earns cashback or miles, on top of whatever your credit card already gives you.

So why does this site exist?

Because rates are all over the place. The same store can pay 2% on one portal and 10% on another - on the same day - and rates change constantly. Checking every portal by hand is not realistic, but defaulting to using just one or two portals leaves money on the table. Hence the name: check before you shop.

Reading the numbers like a regular

• The verdict box answers "is today's rate good?" by measuring today's number against that store's own rate history.
• "Checked" badges show when we last confirmed each rate on the portal's own page. If we haven't been able to re-check one, it's flagged stale - still shown, clearly labeled.
• "Up to" means the store pays different rates on different categories (open the row for the breakdown, and for the fine print on what doesn't earn at all).
• When there's a note like "Ends April 16", all this means is that the portal has stated the rate will end on this day. However, there's a lot of marketing in this. All cashback portal rates are temporary - they change frequently. In other words, take "limited time" rates with a grain of salt.
• Miles stay miles. 3 mi/$ on AAdvantage is shown as such. If you want to assign a dollar value to points, sign into your account and do so (we pre-populate some point values, but everyone values points differently). You can then turn on 'Rank by value' on the store's page to see how portals stack up, using your custom point values.

The honest fine print

• Exclusions are real. Gift cards usually don't earn, and some categories pay less or nothing at all. We show each portal's restrictions that we can see next to each rate, but the portal's own terms are always the final word.
• Tracking isn't guaranteed. When you make a purchase through a cashback portal, the portal uses cookies (in your web browser) to track your purchase. What this means for you is that, to reduce the hassle of tracking down a purchase that didn't track, the best practices are to:
  1. Make sure your shopping cart is empty when you click to the store from the portal
  2. Not use coupon codes unless the portal has posted them
  3. Turn off any ad-blockers (or, a simpler option, use an incognito/private browsing window)
  While doing these three things won't guarantee a purchase tracks, it will significantly increase the likelihood that it will.
• Rates move. Every number here shows when we last confirmed it, and the status page shows how fresh each portal's data is. A best practice is to quickly glance at the rate (and exclusions) on the portal itself before you make a purchase.

Common questions

Does this cost anything? Checking rates is free, no account needed, and the portals are free to join too. A free account adds a rate alert and saved point values. Premium gets you more alerts with instant delivery, the full rate archive, exports, and premium on our sister site PointAuctions.com, for $5/mo, $50/yr, or $150 once.

Do portals pay to be listed here? No - nothing here is pay-to-play. We list all portals we can, hard stop, and portals cannot pay us to hide or obfuscate their rankings. If we ever highlight or feature a portal, it will be clearly labeled as such. Some portal links earn us a referral bonus when you join through them; that's disclosed everywhere it applies and never touches the numbers. The full story is on the disclosure page.

Which portal should I join? Whichever is paying the most at the store you want to make a purchase at. Joining portals is free, and most people have accounts at more than a handful of them. The one caveat is that if you sign up, and make a purchase through a new portal, you have to make sure you actually cash out once cashback posts. An account on CheckBeforeYouShop helps with just this: click receipts give you a bird's eye view of every portal shopping trip you start here, and if cashback goes missing, the claim tracker keeps the claim, your screenshots, and the portal's filing deadline in one place.

Cashback, miles, or points - which should I earn? Depends on what you'll actually use. Cash is simple: a dollar is a dollar. Miles can be worth well more than the cashback rate on the same purchase, but only if you actually redeem them. We show each in its own units and let you decide.

Go deeper

The guides cover stacking (portal + card + coupon on one purchase), airline portals, and why rates change. The about page explains who builds this and how the data is collected, and the jam incident. Or just search your next store and see for yourself.