Cash Back Portals

I am always surprised when I find out that not everyone uses shopping portals for their online purchases. Even worse, some people don’t even know what a shopping portal is. Receiving cash back, miles or points from a simple click of the mouse is almost too easy

What exactly IS a shopping portal?

A shopping portal is a third-party website that offers you an incentive for clicking through their “portal” on the way to the website you want to visit.

When you click on the store’s name, the portal receives a small commission on any purchase you make and you all your normal perks such as miles, points or cash back as a reward.  It’s a win-win for everyone involved and very easy to save additional money.

There are some privacy concerns, as the shopping portal in regards to tracking your visits. The reality is every site and credit card is already tracking you, but in this case you might as well get paid for them spying on you.

As the portal only gets paid when you buy something, most portals go out of the way to entice shoppers by compiling various promotions. Each portals competes with others portals for a shoppers business, which is a benefit to all of us as they keep getting better offers.

How to Use a Shopping Portal

Each time I am shopping line, the first thing I do is visit Cashback Monitor. This handy shopping portal aggregator collects data from lots of different portals and puts them in a neat table. You find which payout you wish to use and click though, super easy and quick. Payouts change often so its always a good idea to check Cashback Monitor each time you shop.

Example of IHG search at Cashback Monitor

I was recently making a reservation for an IHG hotels stay so I visited Cashback Monitor and viewed the offers. The 10% cash back from Top Cashback was the offer I went with for my hotel reservations. Clicking through, I was directed to IHG site so I still received member rates and IHG points from the booking. IHG seems to have a lot of these 10% back which is just amazing.

Other Cool Features

One cool feature of Cashback Monitor is the best rate history. Click on the Best Rate History link and you can see the highest and the lowest payout rates. This does help me when I may have a larger purchase to make that is not time sensitive. If the rate is currently low I will often wait to see if the cash back rate goes up.