Travel Blog + Dining Blog + Frequent Flyer Tips Blog

Buying Something Online? STOP! Do This First

Did you know there are websites that will reward you to begin your shopping trip on their website? Many stores will pay a commission to websites for referring customers. In turn, those sites will pass a portion of their commission back to you in the form of cash back, airline miles, or other points.

So, before I make any purchase or make any sort of travel reservation, I go to evreward.com. Ev’reward is an online directory of shopping portal sites. All you have to do is type in the site that you are going to purchase from (or make a reservation) and ev’reward tells you how much a shopping portal will reward you for your purchase.

One of my favorite shopping portals is http://www.ebates.com. Ebates pays back cashback for your purchases. For example, as of this writing, ebates is paying 13.5% cash back for reservations at Priority Club properties (Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Intercontinental, Hotel Indigo, etc.) Remember, this is free money for something you were going to buy anyways!

Another portal that I use is the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall. I have access to the UR Mall because I have the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card (I’ll talk about this fantastic credit card in a future post).

When a store isn’t available in either the UR mall or ebates, I’ll use www.mypoints.com. MyPoints offers points that can be cashed in for gift cards or cash.

I used to use the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping Mall for all of my purchases, however, their customer service was absolutely atrocious. I plan on talking more about these shopping portals specifically in future posts, so keep checking back!


If you are not a member of some of the above site, sign up today! There are no costs to use these shopping portals.

  •  ebates: where it pays to shop online (Full disclosure: I will earn a referral bonus if you use this link)
  • Mr. Rebates (Full disclosure: I will earn a referral bonus if you use this link)
  • MyPoints (Full disclosure: I will earn a referral bonus if you use this link)
  •  Ultimate Rewards Mall: available only if you have certain Chase credit cards

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