How To Ensure You Are Earning Miles On Every Online Purchase

How To Ensure You Are Earning Miles On Every Online Purchase

If you are anything like me, then outside of grocery shopping, you probably do all of your online shopping online.

Not only does online shopping typically offer the best price but you also don’t have to pay tax!

While most Credit Cards have some sort of branded Online Shopping Mall where you can earn bonus miles / points for online purchases, unless someone publicizes a good deal like the 36 mile per $1 spent at Nordstrom, most people are too lazy to check which Online Shopping Malls offer the best bonus mile offers.

Luckily there is a site called Evreward.com that essentially is a Google for aggregating all the bonus mile offers for online shopping.

It compiles online bonus offers from all the major airlines, hotels, and cash back programs.

Instead of you personally searching to see which your Credit Cards’ Online Shopping Mall is offering the most bonus miles, you can simply use Evreward.

Anytime I am planning on buying something online, the first site I always check is Evreward to see if the retailer I am planning on shopping at has any bonus mile offers.

9/10 times they do!

The reason I decided to cover this topic today is because it is a really easy way to earn some bonus miles on online shopping that you are already doing.

Also it is a great way to have some activity in a Frequent Flyer account that you don’t use very often, so as to keep the miles from expiring!

This way you don’t have to fly or anything like that to keep the miles alive, instead you just make a simple purchase online for something you were already planning on purchasing.

It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Case and Point

At work this morning, I got an email from Groupon for a sushi place around my neighborhood.

Although I could have just bought it on my iPhone, in the spirit of earning some additional miles, I decided to wait until I got home.

First thing I did when I got home was visit Evreward and see if Groupon had any bonus mile opportunities.

To my surprise, there were quite a few bonus offers from Delta, American, United, Priority Club, Marriott, etc.

Additionally there was a whopping 15% cash back from Discover.

Under other circumstances, I would have just used my Discover Card and gotten 15% cash back, however I am trying to meet my minimum spend on my Chase INK Bold so I remembered that Chase also has an Online Shopping Mall via their Ultimate Rewards program.

Update: I had previously written that Evreward does not include Ultimate Rewards in its search, but it looks like that is not the case. However for the sake of showing people how to use the Ultimate Rewards Online Shopping Mall, I will keep the rest of the post up.

While you do need a Chase Credit Card that participates in Ultimate Rewards to log onto the Ultimate Rewards Online Shopping Mall, when making your purchase through Chase’s site, you don’t necessarily have to use your Chase Freedom, Sapphire Preferred, or INK Bold to get bonus miles for your purchase.

People have reported earning bonus miles through the Ultimate Rewards Online Shopping Mall even when using store gift cards and non-Chase Credit Cards. However since I have never tried it, I am going to say Your Mileage May Vary on this one.

After logging into Chase’s Ultimate Rewards, simply go to the Earn Faster tab and click Browse Merchants.

If you look at their current best offers, some of them are pretty good like 12 UR points per $1 spent at Restaurant.com or 10 UR points per $1 spent at Kohl’s.

Since most Stores now let you buy online and return to the Store, there isn’t really any harm in buying clothes online and then exchanging them at the physical store if they don’t fit.

After searching for Groupon, I found it and was disappointed to see only 2 UR points per $1 spent. : (

I get this question a lot so I will just quickly make a point of clarification.

Any bonus miles you get from Online Shopping Malls are earned completely separate from your Credit Card.

So if I had decided to click-through Ultimate Rewards to Groupon and earned 2 UR points per $1 spent, this would be on top of the 1 UR point per $1 spent that I would earn on my Chase INK Bold card for making the purchase with that Card.

So all in all, I would earn 2 UR points from the Chase’s Online Shopping Mall and then 1 UR point with my Chase Credit Card for my purchase at Groupon.

Since Evreward was showing that some of the other loyalty programs were offering a better bonus rate than Chase’s 2 UR points per $1 spent, I quickly logged into AwardWallet and checked to see if any of my 30 frequent flyer / loyalty programs were expiring in the near future.

If any of them were, I would then use that program’s Online Shopping Mall to buy my Groupon since it would reset the clock on my account activity and prevent any of my miles/points from expiring.

Ultimately, all my programs were good to go until 2013, so I went with the highest bonus which was Discover with 15% cash back.

On my $20 Groupon purchase, I ended up saving $3 using Evreward and Discover.

One Other Thing

To save yourself the hassle of the miles/points not posting, remember to clear your cookies before you visit Evreward.

Typically people visit their favorite online shopping site, see something they like, visit Evreward, and then click through whatever Online Shopping Mall back to the original shopping site.

Since you technically visited your shopping site prior to visiting Evreward, there is a cookie saved on your computer, so when you click through a Online Shopping Mall, it might not register since you have have been to the site before.

Basically if this happens, then you have to call or email the Online Shopping Mall to investigate why the miles/points never posted and is just a huge waste of your time, so the moral of this story is ALWAYS REMEMBER TO CLEAR YOUR COOKIES prior to visiting Evreward and you will save yourself a headache!

-Parag