[ANAYLSIS] Online Shopping Portals
Online shopping portals have been around for many years, helping shoppers by earning quicker rewards through online purchases. A popular Canadian shopping portal is www.shop.ca, offering bonus or multipliers of points when you purchase a particular product or make purchases during a promotional period.
What is the basic rule to online shopping? If you can make the purchase online rather than in store and earn extra rewards for it, then you should go for it. For example, if you were planning to purchase a new suitcase, and purchasing online would allow you to earn 10X the points, the obvious answer would be to purchase the one online.
Some online shopping portals in which would be of interest to Canadians are the following:
Aeroplan eStore by Air Canada Aeroplan
RBC Rewards eMall by RBC
Online MBNA Rewards Mall by MBNA
Ebates.ca (Cash Back)
Air Miles Shops by Air Miles
eBoutique by Air Canada
Depending on what type of points and miles you frequent, focussing your accrual on these particular rewards will be most valuable to you. You can also see that each shopping portal has its own set of merchants in which other portals may not have. You may also find that you can earn two types of loyalty points from the same retailer. For example, you can earn bonus points at the Apple Store at both the RBC Rewards eMall and Aeroplan eStore. The difference will be deciding whether to bank your points to RBC Rewards points or Aeroplan points.
Another reason why we would want to resort to online shopping portals is to keep some of our accounts active. With a co-branded credit card, it is easy to keep our accounts active because all we would need is to make a purchase with that card. However, with Airlines membership cards, it may be difficult to keep them active, unless we travel frequently on that particular airline.
Also, if you’re short on points for specific reward redemption, you may want to look at making an online shopping portal purchase as the rewards can add up quickly, allowing you to redeem the reward you want at that specific time.
With online shopping portals, you can opt into a double dipping process by using a credit card which will earn you more points on certain purchases. If you are a TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite Privilege cardholder, you will be able to earn 1.25 Aeroplan miles per 1$ spent in addition to the bonus points earned on the online shopping portal. This can be very rewarding as your points will multiply very quickly based on the type of products you are looking to acquire.