Before you buy online, click through a cash back shopping portal to the store you already planned to use. The store pays the portal a referral commission, and the portal passes part of it to you, on top of your card rewards. Use it only for purchases you would make anyway.
The payoff grows with the cart. At 3% back, a $600 laptop you were buying anyway returns $18 for two extra clicks.
The catch is tracking. A portal gets paid only when the store can see that you arrived through its link, so the order of your steps decides whether the cash back shows up. Rakuten says to activate cash back before adding anything to the cart, confirms it with a pop-up, and warns that checking out in a different tab can break tracking.
Ad blockers, VPNs, and private browsing windows can hide the order from the portal. A coupon code found anywhere but the portal can void the cash back, so use one only when it saves more than the cash back would pay. A second shopping extension, such as a coupon finder, can also replace the portal’s link with its own and take credit for the sale.
Pick one or two portals, such as Rakuten or TopCashback. Before a big purchase, check a comparison site like Cashback Monitor, which lists what each portal pays at the same store. Pay with your usual rewards card. The card issuer pays those rewards, so you earn them on top of the portal’s cash back.
Read the store’s terms on the portal before you buy. At Rakuten, most gift cards, taxes, and shipping earn nothing, and returned or canceled orders lose their cash back. Expect to wait, too. A tracked order can take a few hours to several days to appear in your Rakuten account. The store then usually takes 3 to 14 weeks to confirm it, and Rakuten pays out quarterly.
If the cash back is the reason you’re buying, close the tab. Skipping a purchase always saves more than any cash back on it.
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