I once wrote an article introducing various shopping portals. Now I would like to recommend strongly a website that integrates almost all of the shopping portals: Cashback Monitor.
Contents
1. Introduction to Shopping Portals
Shopping portals offer you extra cashback for your online purchases, sometimes even with in-store purchases. This is in addition to the cashback you already earn from your credit cards. Entry-level readers can read this article to learn more basic information.
2. Introduction to Cashback Monitor
Shopping portals compete with each other and can offer widely varying rates for the same merchants. Cashback Monitor is here to help us by listing the cashback rate from almost all the shopping portals.
Cashback Monitor summarizes the cashback rates for most merchants and ranks them according to the cashback categories in green columns. The data is updated every day around 4-6 am EST, so the rates are usually reliable.
In addition to the comparison of cashback rates, Cashback Monitor provides a chart showing the best rate history when you click “View Best Rate History”. Details show up when placing mouse on the chart. By knowing the history rates, you will know whether the current rates are good deals, so that you can decide without hesitation.
The 50 most popular merchants are shown on the homepage of Cashback Monitor. To search for merchants other than these popular ones, you can type the merchant name in the blank. Pay attention to the names as merchants with similar names will be shown.
Cashback Monitor has an add-on that can really make online shopping convenient, which is called Bookmarklet. When this add-on is active, it will show cashback rates when clicked while visiting online stores. This function is highly recommended.
3. Points/Miles Values
Those who love the points and miles find it very convenient to use Cashback Monitor as they can define points/miles values. Usually, values of points and miles are set in default as 1 cent per mile/point. Nonetheless, advanced award travelers know how to maximize the values of points/miles. This is a good reference for typical values of common points/miles, although different people value them differently. It may be hard to determine whether to use shopping portals that rewards points/miles, or ones that reward cash. The good news is that you can customize your points/miles values so that they can be compared. This function requires registration and log-in. After customization, all points/miles are converted to cashback percentages respectively, so are the lengths of green bars.
4. Other Functions
The “My Monitor” function can help you add your favorite stores to a personal table so that you don’t need to search each time.
The “My Alert” function can notify you when the cashback rate of a specific store reaches your anticipated rate
You may visit Cashback Monitor to explore by yourself and learn more.
5. Personal Experiences
There are a lot of shopping portals nowadays. Sometimes you would find it troublesome or annoying when using shopping portals nowadays, such as failed tracking, or wrong cashback rate. I would like to advise that you can choose one or two shopping portals nowadays which have a good cashback rate and competitive customer service team. Using too many shopping portals will increase the management time cost, and also make withdrawing money difficult as there is usually minimum amount limit to do so.
Furthermore, it is strongly recommended that every T&C should be read carefully, especially with “up to” words. As some websites claims that they offer high cashback rate. But after reading the T&C carefully, it can easily be found that the high rate is for some specific goods/categories. It might offer nothing for other categories. This is where Cashback Monitor can improve. Please refer to my article for my favorite shopping portals.