Reminder: restrictions do differ between different shopping portals

/

Starting online purchases at a shopping portal is one of the simplest techniques travel hackers use, and it’s also one of the most reminiscent of extreme couponing: click through an online portal (be sure to clear your browser’s cookies first), make a purchase, and you’ll earn some miles, points, or cashback from the portal in addition to your credit card rewards.

While there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different online shopping portals, with a little bit of experience they can come to seem more or less interchangeable (they’re mostly operated by the same firm on the backend), which can be both a good and bad thing. It’s a good thing when it means the same technique will work on multiple portals, like the Wall Street Journal/Barron’s subscription deal; it’s a bad thing when the same restrictions are imposed on each portal, or even across portals.

It’s worth keeping an eye out for differences between portal restrictions

For my sins, I’ve had to book a couple upcoming hotel stays with cash, and decided to see what the current situation was on my online shopping portal accounts. The problem, in general, is that merchants got wise to people double-dipping through both shopping portals and their proprietary rewards programs, and so began to limit portal payouts when you log into your rewards account before completing a reservation. To give a simple example, if you click through to Hotels.com through TopCashBack, you’ll receive 8% cashback if you make your reservation without logging in, but only 2% cashback if you log in first:


BeFrugal is slightly more competitive, at 10% and 2.5%, respectively:

While this may seem like a cheap move for Hotels.com (because it is), the logic is obvious: they already operate a loyalty program offering a rebate of “about” 10% on hotel stays (every ten nights booked through the site earns a free night of equal or lesser average value). Giving people an additional discount just for knowing about it must give their director of marketing enough heartburn as it is.

This compromise at least makes shoppers stop and think: it’s true 12.5% (through BeFrugal) is higher than 10%(logged into Hotels.com), but a 10% cash payout might be more valuable than a 10% in-kind payout with a 2.5% cash bonus. In fact, I think under virtually all circumstances it would be.

But not all shopping portals have identical restrictions

Ideally, what you’d like is a shopping portal with a competitive payout rate that still works on rewards-earning transactions, and that’s why it’s worth checking the restrictions on each portal, instead of just assuming they’re all identical.

Lemoney, for example, offers 5.5% cashback at Hotels.com without restriction on whether you’re also collecting Hotels.com free night credits:

To be clear: while my full cashback amount has already tracked properly, it won’t be payable for months so there’s no way of telling whether I’ll actually receive the full amount.

I found the same was true at Hilton, where BeFrugal offers 6% cashback to non-members and non-elite members, but just 1.5% to Silver, Gold, and Diamond elites:

While Lemoney offers 4% cashback to everyone:

Conclusion

Shopping portals have never played a particularly large role in my travel hacking game, simply because I’ve always been fortunate enough to have access to adequate manufactured spend to meet my travel needs, so this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive look into shopping portals, let alone a recommendation to use one over another (although feel free to find my own personal referral links on my Support the Site! page).

But it is meant as a reminder that while shopping portal terms are often similar, they aren’t always identical, and the differences between them can end up being more lucrative than you expect, particularly when you do end up needing to pay cash for travel expenses.