Online shopping portals can be a great way to pick up miles & points for purchases you’d make anyway. Just for following a specific link, you can earn bonus points or cash back in addition to the rewards you’d earn for credit card spending.
Sometimes companies really want you to buy products from them, to the point that it can make sense to purchase something through an online shopping portal even if you don’t actually have a use for it. Along those lines, there are a few such promotions available right now, which I think are worth taking advantage of. However, they’re only available for a limited time and could be pulled at any point, so you’ll want to act fast.
I covered similar offers some number of weeks back, but these deals do tend to reappear every so often. I’m taking advantage of all of these that I’m eligible for, given that I can’t turn down points at this rate…
Rakuten has a $50 (5,000 point) refer-a-friend offer
The offers I’m going to cover below are useful for both new and existing Rakuten members. However, if you’re not yet a Rakuten member, let me mention that the company has a great refer-a-friend program, which stacks with these deals.
If you’re new to Rakuten you can register using a refer-a-friend link, and then you’ll earn an additional $50 bonus after completing your first purchase of at least $50. While I ordinarily recommend unlocking this bonus with a simple gift card purchase, you can also stack it with any of the above offers, to get an even better return.
Earn 95% cash back or 95x points with Rakuten
At the moment, Rakuten is offering 95% cash back or 95x points on purchases with select retailers:
Let me emphasize that you should always read the “terms & exclusions” section at each link to see what kind of purchases qualify, as they differ by company. Perhaps you find value in one of these services, but even if you don’t, this is a price at which it’s hard to resist points.
What I love about Rakuten is the ability to earn points rather than cash back, to get even more value, since that transforms these subscriptions from being basically free, to potentially being profitable:
Let me just give one example of how this process works. I recently took advantage of this offer with Surfshark.
The idea was that you could spend $113.13 on the most expensive eligible plan, and then earn either $107.47 back, or receive 10,747 Amex or Bilt points.
Taking advantage of this is easy. Once you’re registered for Rakuten (if you’re not already), follow this link to go to the Surfshark page, and make sure you see the 95% back offer (this likely won’t be around that much longer). Then click through to be redirected to Surfshark’s website.
Here are the key terms of this offer:
Cash Back is only available for new Surfshark customers on first purchase. Limited to one per member.
If you want to get as many points as possible, buy the two year plan (with three more free months, for a total of 27 months) for the Surfshark One+ bundle.
The price should then be $113.13, so you can pay for that with whatever credit card you’d like.
A short time after making your purchase, you should see the transaction show up as “pending” in your Rakuten account, initially with a $0 amount. However, some time later, it should update to show the correct amount.
Why I’m very happy buying points at this cost!
I love collecting points, and of course I try to earn them as inexpensively as possible. That can include credit card welcome offers, maximizing my return on spending, etc. I’m also happy to just outright buy points, if the price is right.
Personally, if I can pick up transferable points for well under 1.2 cents each, I consider that to be a deal, and it’s something I’d do all day long. I absolutely can get outsized value with that. For example, I’m choosing to earn Bilt points with Rakuten right now, so indirectly earning Alaska Atmos Rewards points or World of Hyatt points for this price is tough to beat, if you ask me. There’s no way I won’t get significantly outsized value here.
And of course if you can actually get use out of these services, the math is even better. Some people may wonder why these companies are offering such a good return on spending. Clearly these companies want to acquire new customers, and the incremental cost of actually providing the service is very low.
So the hope is that the big reward gets people to try the service, and then keep it in the long run. Or at a minimum, maybe the company hopes that people forget to cancel their auto-renewal.
I’ve now taken advantage of several Rakuten promotions in recent weeks offering 85-100x points per dollar spent, and I’m very happy with the value being offered.
Bottom line
At the moment, Rakuten is offering 95% cash back (or 95x points) on purchases with three different services, and you can potentially take advantage of multiple of these. If you value transferable points, I think most people would agree that acquiring points for 1.0-1.1 cents each is quite a good deal (and that assumes you place no value on the services as such).
The math is even better if you’re not yet a Rakuten member, as you can receive a further bonus of $50 (or potentially 5,000 points). 😉
Are you taking advantage of any of these Rakuten offers?