Shopping portals or mileage malls, whether earning points or cash back (or your choice of those, like Rakuten), are a brilliant arbitrage business.

Brands pay a commission for sales. These sites want the commission, so they rebate most of it to the consumer who will use their links to make purchases. Instead of, say, earning 5% on whatever they’re able to get you to buy they earn 1% and pass 4% back to you. That gets them a lot more money overall because of the volume.

But it’s a competitive business. Many consumers will chase the biggest rebate, searching for the best deal efficiently with a site like Cash Back Monitor to compare the offerings for each store in one place.

And of course there’s no reason not to earn points as a rebate on things you’re going to purchase anyway. The trick is not to spend more money than you otherwise would have chasing those points. I especially like earning with:

AAdvantage eShopping because you don’t just earn redeemable miles, but each mile (excluding bonuses they occasionally offer like x miles for spending y dollars across the site) counts towards status as well.

Rakuten because the earn rates are often very high, and you can choose between cash back, Amex Membership Rewards points, and Bilt Rewards points. You need at least Silver status with Bilt for Rakuten points to transfer at 1:1 to Bilt Rewards but it’s hard not to earn that with a Bilt credit card. And their points are the single most valuable currency.

And remember that you can often stack deals too – go through a shopping portal link to earn points, earn points on your mileage-earning credit card for the purchase, and also take advantage of card-linked offers (like Amex Offers, Chase Offers, American’s SimplyMiles, etc.). Just note that some coupon discounts can invalidate shopping portal earn so you’d have to choose which is better – or stick to coupons promoted on the shopping portal page itself.

Against this backdrop, I’d note that Air France KLM Flying Blue has introduced the Flying Blue Apple Store. And it’s notable for a couple of reasons.

Strong earn for Apple products. They highlight:

Earn on products excluded on other portals such as:


Credit: Kanesue via Wikimedia Commons

There are often shopping portal bonuses and elevated offers with Apple, and I realize I don’t often write about them. I’m not sure whether it’s because they don’t seem that strong to me – I get less excited by them than I see others seeming elsewhere. Maybe that’s also because I’m less personally in the Apple ecosystem, perhaps a function of being more ‘corporate’ (I’m a 30-year work-issued Thinkpad guy) and ‘old school’ (having gotten my first modem in the early 80s).

And unless a deal is profitable in its own right, I won’t tend to report heavily on it – don’t buy things simply because they are a ‘good deal’ relative to their usual price. You wouldn’t have paid that price anyway, as evidenced by the fact that you didn’t. Don’t buy things just because there’s an elevated offer, those offers are great for things you were going to buy anyway – impulse purchases are often suboptimal choices. But it pays to be aware of new opportunities for the best deals when you do buy.

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