March 1
Here are the March updates to the Ultimate Rewards shopping portal bonuses. In case you aren’t overly familiar with how the Chase Ultimate Rewards shopping portal works, then head to this post for detailed instructions.
The payouts can vary based on the type of Ultimate Rewards card you log in with (Chase Freedom® Visa , Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus Business Card, etc), but this month doesn’t see many substantial differences between the different cards, so I will just list the payouts all together. As has been true for a while now, there was very little change this month (for the better or the worse), but here are some example payouts at some popular retailers:
Improved:
Pottery Barn returned to the portal at 2x (was gone for over a month)
Tom’s Shoes 7x (from 3x)
Stayed the Same:
HR Block at Home 15x
Office Max 5x
Shoebuy 10x
Sears 5x
J. Crew 5x
Magazines.com 30x
Target 2x
The North Face 8x
Restaurant.com 15x
Home Depot 3x
Apple 1x
Kohls 10x
Staples 2x
Lowes 5x
Macy’s 5x
Gap 3x
Drugstore.com 7x
Decreased:
Best Buy 1x (from 2x)
Pottery Barn Kids 2x (from 3x)
Some good news is that while the Ultimate Rewards portal has not been all that exciting recently, the United MileagePlus Shopping portal does have a few good increases that put the payouts higher than UR. Some of these payouts are only this high for those with a United co-branded card.
DSW 12x
J. Crew 8x
Sephora 8x
Charles Tyrwhitt 12x
Crate & Barrel 6x
Nordstrom 6x
US Airways Dividend Miles Storefront:
Sears 6x
Remember to compare these rates to other portals to make sure you are getting the best payout possible. You can use a site like evreward.com to quickly compare different portal payout rates for a given retailer. However, especially for a large purchase, I would manually compare the portals myself to make sure I am getting 100% accurate info on the payouts and any possible bonuses.
As always, an easy way to view all the changes for the Ultimate Reward and United MileagePlus Shopping payouts for the month is to head to Hiker T’s site. Did I leave out any good payouts you spotted?
Disclosure: I do receive a commission if you are approved for a credit card using one of my affiliate links. As always, thanks for your support.
Nice! Thank you for the Sephora tip at 8 UA per dollar
I am going to combo it with gift card purchases at Staples and earn 5x UR points per dollar on the Chase Ink Bold to get 13.
Lowe’s is a bonus category for the Chase Freedom next quarter. It seems possible to get 5x from the portal and 5x from the category bonus, no?
@Owen G,
Yes! We’ve all been getting 12x at drugstore.com all quarter!
@MommyPoints:
I just checked at United Airlines. I see Sephora only offering 6 miles per dollar. I even went through your link and it still said only 6. Can you verify and confirm what the offer is?
Some of these payouts are only this high for those with a United co-branded card.
Do you have to use the United card to make the purchase, or simply be logged in as someone who has the card? Since I have minimum spend to make on some of my new non-United cards, I’d like to use one of those. Do I still get the enhanced miles since I do have a United Card? Or does using another card reduce the miles they give me for the purchase?
@Robert Hanson,
Thanks, logged in with my account and got the 8 point offer.
I personally have not tested the MileagePlus Mall, but I have confirmed that many merchants at the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall work with any card. I even have used gift cards to shop at Sephora.
On the UA MP shopping portal, it says
“Remember to use your MileagePlus credit card. Cardholders are eligible for increased miles offers from participating stores in addition to earning one mile for every dollar you spend using your card.”
From the terms, it seems to only say you need to be a cardholder. It doesn’t say anything about paying with your card.
Of course, Pottery Barn would have to come back now that I bought a new chandelier from their website a month ago! Glad to see that it’s back for the future, though.
…and always remember shoppers, all of these mall portals are back ended by Cartera and they often make mistakes, fail to pay out, make you jump thru hoops to recoup missing miles and post later than promissed too.
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Fortunately the Chase UR mall is nudged upon by Chase so interestingly enough youll rarely if ever see any negative issues as such. Ive had only two small instances of UR that didnt post and when I called Chase they gave me the missing points right away. This is NOT the case when that happens with the airline malls… Ill never use any of those again unless my attitude is “well ill buy this planning to earn no rewards at all on my online purchase (which means i really should have bought it elsewhere to begin with where i know i would) and if anything ever credits to my airline then im happy.
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My advice: rely solely on the Chase-monitored UR mall
So Am I understanding I can use a Starwood Amex at the Chase UR portal and get, for example , the 2x points with travelocity or 10x at Kohl’s.
I used a different card there by mistake and didn’t get any UR’s from the portal–how would one go about complaining to Chase when you didn’t use their card?
I only see 3X for sears, can you confirm it?
Michelle, it did go down a few days after this post was written. I believe it is 4x at US Airways and I heard it was 6x at American now, but I haven’t seen that one myself.