I love it when a plan comes together!
Several shopping portals ran promotions last month offering bonus miles or cashback when hitting certain spending thresholds. I’d mentioned in that post that it should be possible to buy gift cards from GiftCards.com or Raise in order to earn those bonuses seeing as those two stores earned regular cashback/miles through several of the portals.
One slight concern was that the terms of the promotion excluded gift card purchases. I took that to be standard wording seeing as gift card purchases don’t typically earn cashback/miles through portals, but that it didn’t really apply to GiftCards.com and Raise seeing as their entire businesses revolve around selling gift cards. This was backed up by data points from Craig at Middle Age Miles who’d confirmed himself that GiftCards.com purchases have triggered airline portal bonuses in the past.
Still, things change, so there was no guarantee that this would still work. I therefore decided to test this out using the Upromise portal as they were offering a $100 bonus when spending $1,250. I bought 3x $500 Visa gift cards from GiftCards.com to take me over that $1,250 spending threshold.
Although it took a few weeks to arrive, I finally received an email from Upromise confirming that my purchase had tracked. They offered 1% cashback as standard, so it confirmed I’d be earning $15.21 from the purchase (the extra $0.21 is due to earning 1% cashback on the 3x $6.95 activation fees as well).
Having that purchase track for regular cashback had been my main concern, so getting that confirmation email put my mind at ease as I assumed the $100 bonus would follow in due course. Sure enough, I received an email from Upromise today confirming that I’d earned the $100 (see the image at the top of this post).
When logging in to my Upromise account, there’s an entry for that $100. It’s not payable at the moment, but that’s presumably because the 1% cashback from GiftCards.com isn’t payable yet either.
$115.21 cashback on a $1,520.85 Visa gift card purchase is an awesome result though, making more than $90 profit even after accounting for liquidation costs.
I only tested this out on the one portal, but I might have to hit several portal bonuses in the future given this positive result.
Actually this is the only one for me that originally wasn’t tracking and now is payable. I did all the other airline ones except Delta and no bonus points have posted except for the portal spend
I’ve found the airline portal bonuses can sometimes take a long time to be credited, so you’ll hopefully still get the bonuses at some point.
[…] through the Alaska Airlines shopping portal, so they should trigger these bonuses. This worked with a recent Upromise promotion and I’d expect it to work with this one […]
[…] gift card purchases, but that doesn’t seem to apply to purchases from Raise or GiftCards.com (see the results of my test with the Upromise portal here). That therefore means you can earn up to 4.33x on gift card purchases which is a nice […]
[…] There are a couple of exceptions to this though – GiftCards.com and Raise. Both of those only sell gift cards, but they do earn cashback through the Upromise portal (1% and 2% respectively at the time of writing). When Upromise offered a $100 bonus last year, I purchased some Visa gift cards to test this out. Sure enough, I ended up earning 1% cashback on the Visa gift cards as standard, along with the $100 bonus. […]
[…] always, the terms exclude gift cards but that’s not strictly true based on past experience. That exclusion seems to be based on the fact that gift card purchases from most online retailers […]
[…] these bonus miles/points/cashback amounts. I can’t guarantee it’ll still work, but I earned $100 bonus cashback from Upromise towards the end of last year when they ran a similar promotion, so I’d expect it to work […]