Leveraging Shopping Portals With Kiwii
We’re huge fans of shopping portals here at Kiwii and strong believers that they don’t get the attention they rightfully deserve. They’re easily one of the best ways to earn all kinds of extra rewards when you shop online. But the extra steps can be annoying…and we couldn’t agree more.
So we made it easy. Whether you’re using the Kiwii extension or not, we’ve got you covered on all things shopping portals!
Shopping Portals with the Kiwii Extension
For the uninitiated, with the Kiwii browser extension installed, you’ll get a popup anytime you get ready to checkout that lets you know which of your cards is best to use on that site. But Kiwii also has all of of the major airline and credit card shopping portals built in so you’ll be alerted as soon as you get to a site that has an associated portal deal. This way you’ll know about the deals before you even start shopping. To make it even easier, you can click the link straight from the popup to activate the bonus rewards and then get right back to shopping. For example, you’d see a popup like this as soon as you got to Nike.com:
Just click the link at the top of the popup to get to the portal deal and activate it by clicking “Shop Now”. You’ll see a screen sending you back to Nike and then you’re teed up to stack your rewards with an extra 3x points on your purchase!
And just like that you’re back at Nike.com. It’s that simple.
But what if you’re not using the Kiwii extension or you’re away from your computer and on your phone or tablet instead?
In that case, meet our newest addition:
Kiwii Boost is everything shopping portals. It’s a tool right on our site that aggregates all of the data from the major portals into one spot. Boost leverages the engine behind the Kiwii extension to give you the ability to search by shopping portal, retailer and even by category. So whether you know exactly what store you’re looking for or just have a rough idea of what you’re looking to buy, Kiwii Boost is a great place to start so you know where to find the most rewards beforehand. And since the portal deals can change at any given time, you’ll also find historical charts within each retailer so you can see how their current deals compare over time.
We’ll walk you through the basics and let you take it from there.
How to Use Kiwii Boost
When you get to the Kiwii Boost page, you’ll see our “Featured Merchants” that day across the different portals.
These are stores offering especially high or rare rewards with a graph that helps give you a quick snapshot of how that deal looks historically.
Tip: These usually don’t last long, so you’ll want to act quick if there’s a retailer or deal that piques your interest.
Then to the left are your filter options.
You can narrow down your search by specific portals if you only want to see certain ones or leave them open to see across all of the portals. Below the “Portal” filters are the options to filter by “Category”. This is a great way to narrow down what stores to focus on if you know what item you’re looking for but aren’t sure where you can get the most bang for your buck in terms of rewards. This is a great way to do some quick research before you make a large purchase too.
Feel free to mix and match filters between various portals and categories to see what kind of deals are out there!
Pro Tip: Some categories like Flowers, Cosmetics (Health & Beauty) and Shoes often offer really high returns but can fluctuate drastically between retailers on any given day.
The only portals you’ll need specific cards to access are the Chase Ultimate Rewards portals, which are broken down into either the Freedom or Sapphire cards. United Airlines also has a separate portal specific to United cardholders.
Other than that, all you need to do is be a member of the respective airline’s loyalty program (which we’d highly recommend since they’re all free to join and why not rack up extra miles even if you’re not a frequent flyer!).
And finally, you can click on a graph at any time to open up the “Chart” view which can give you a better idea of how a retailer’s current bonus rewards compare historically.
The Under Armour chart is a perfect example of how timing is everything with some portal deals.
Portal deals change all the time, so this can be really helpful in determining when to make a purchase since you’ll know exactly when and how that deal has changed over time.
The Bottom Line
Shopping portals are one of the best ways out there to earn significantly more credit card or airline rewards when you shop online and all it takes is a few extra clicks. The bonus rewards add up quickly and can make a huge difference over time. So now that you have some great shopping portal tools at your disposal, start boosting your rewards!
As always, we love hearing feedback from the Kiwii community so let us know what you think!