From storing shopping portals and loyalty programs to credit card rewards and special offers, there’s no shortage of ways to earn discounts while you shop. But how do you know which method is best? With countless discounts and rewards to compare, it’s not always easy to know how to maximize your savings.
That’s why shoppers who want to get the biggest bang for back-using tools like cashback monitors can help them find the biggest reward opportunities for online shopping. This tool and a powerful reward credit card tailored to your spending habits can increase your savings even more.
What is a cashback monitor?
Cashback Monitor is a website that tracks the return rate of many online shopping portals and cashback sites, making it easy to see which platforms earn the most points, miles, or cashback for a particular retailer.
Shopping portal aggregators like cashback monitors allow you to spend the trouble of comparing bonus reward rates yourself and maximize the revenue you have already created for purchases.
How does the cashback monitor work?
The Cashback Monitor is easy to navigate. Here is a breakdown of the most used pages and features:
Navigate the homepage
The homepage is split into two main columns.
- Most viewed stores: The first row shows you the best prices available at the most viewed stores that day, and provides an overview of the most popular deals at any time.
- Stores sorted by reward: The second column shows the highest fees for each store, sorted by estimates of the reward currency issued, such as cashback, points, miles.
Rates are usually updated at least once a day in the morning.
Looking for a retailer
Although you can browse stores and brands with reward types, the easiest way to use a cashback monitor for your next online purchase is to enter the retailer you have selected in the search bar at the top of the site’s homepage. Use Walgreens as an example.
The search results page lists all current rates of return for Walgreens purchases made through one of the 45 shopping portal cashback monitor tracks. This site uses the best deals and bonuses at the top of each column to organize rewards by type, including cashback, travel rewards, credit card points, and other rewards, allowing you to compare portal offers.
The same applies to all other loyalty and shopping programs you can see on the cashback monitor, but you will need to become a member or create a new account to win offers. However, this may not be possible with all portals. If you are a banking operation portal, such as ChaseUltimate Rewards, you will need a credit card issued by Chase, which earns the ultimate reward points to access.
Search for reward rate history
Cashback Monitor has some other useful tools to help you acquire more from the platform. For example, many shopping portals have different bonus offers throughout the year, as they are somewhat similar to credit card spinning in categories. By switching to “View the history of the best rates” The Search Results page lets you see all revenue opportunities for retailers over the past 15 months.
This information will help you decide whether to take advantage of the best offer of the day or wait for a higher rate to return.
Set the reward currency value
Another useful feature is the ability to assign cash value to reward currency. You will need to create a cashback monitor account to assign point values, but in doing so you can specify which shopping portals and stores are most interested in.
Customizing the interface
A less crowded interface makes it easier to identify the best deals.
To access this feature, select “My monitor” Log in to your tabs and accounts and then select “Configure the monitor.” (You can choose up to 8 portals and up to 20 retailers.)
Once that’s squared, you can set up an alert and be notified whenever the reward rate reaches a certain number of specific shopping portals at any of your favorite retailers. This is especially useful if you are ready to make a non-urgent purchase, but choose to wait for a more profitable offer to maximize your revenue better.
Stacking Cashback Monitor handles credit card rewards
One of the best things about using an aggregator like a cashback monitor is that it helps you find a legitimate way to “double dip” with little effort on reward revenue. Simply pay with a reward credit card at checkout and earn points, miles, or cashback from your card in addition to what the portal offers.
Suppose you start shopping in the TrueBlue Shopping Portal and use your JetBlue card to pay for your purchase with Walgreens. In addition to double points, according to cashback monitor data at the time of writing, you will earn 1x points on the card itself.
If your goal is to earn the most rewards possible, you can also install a cashback monitor bookmarklet. A free browser extension available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, takes you from any retail site that shop for cashback monitors in one click, so you can quickly compare all the current offers in that store and get the best deals.
Cashback Monitor doesn’t maintain a tab per online shopping portal, but it monitors a number of portals that offer everything from cashback to miles to credit card points. And while you may not find all the retailers on that site, you will probably find most major retailers fairly easily. Below are some examples of retailers you can find and which shopping portals you are monitoring.
Conclusion
If your goal is saving more money, using sites like Cashback Monitors can create a path for super simple savings. This site will quickly show you which shopping portals will reward you the most, whether you are looking for cashback, points or miles. You can use the site with a larger “payout” and combine it with your favorite credit card. This means you can save more with minimal effort.
*Information about JetBlue cards is collected independently by Bankrate. Card details have not been reviewed or approved by the card issuer.
