How to Maximize Your Holiday Shopping
Tl;dr: Using the right card can maximize your points and offer shopping protections like guaranteed returns and extended warranties. For bonus points, use shopping portals, activate merchant offers, and look for credits and bonus offers from your credit card.
The holiday shopping season is here! With the season of giving (and deals) right around the corner, here’s our guide to squeezing more value out of your holiday purchases, no camping outside Best Buy required. ⛺
1) Find deals
This might come as a surprise, but I’m generally too lazy to scour the internet for the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. The haystack is just too big to find the needles. But your favorite brands are likely to have some sort of offer, so it may be worth checking in. Or you can set a price tracker for the products you actually want, so you’ll know if the products you want are on sale, rather than letting sales make you want the products.
If you’re looking for gifts or just to gear up for your next trip, check out our Lazy Travel Gear page. It collects our favorite travel-enhancers in one place, and helps us keep our affiliate links to a minimum on the site. So you can check out our favorites there, and maybe support us if you make a purchase, or just identify great targets for potential holiday savings!
2) Stack rewards
Here are a few ways to snag extra rewards like points, miles, or cash back, on your holiday purchases. As we like to do here, they are ranked by laziness.
Use the right credit card
Most major credit cards earn at least 1 point, mile, or cent per dollar spent, which is better than (almost) every debit card. But you can do better.
The Citi Strata Elite earns 1.5 (excellent) points per dollar spent, while the Capital One Venture X earns 2 points per dollar. Several cashback cards (including the Citi Double Cash) earn 2% cash back as well.
The Amex Blue Cash Everyday earns 3% cash back on online retail purchases, while the Discover It currently earns 5% cash back at Amazon, the Amazon Prime Visa does so every day, and the Chase Freedom Flex currently earns 5% cash back (or Chase points) at Old Navy and department stores. Other cards can have big bonuses on non-retail spending categories like travel and grocery shopping.
Buy through a shopping portal
Shopping portals can offer extra points, miles, or cash back when used for qualifying online purchases. You can check Cashback Monitor or another aggregator to see which portal offers the most rewards with a given merchant at the time you’re shopping (reward rates vary all the time). Many portals have browser extensions that automatically alert you when you can earn extra rewards wherever you.
Through the end of the year, you can get $50 back in rewards after spending $50 in purchases through Rakuten after signing up via our referral link (we get the same amount! 🙌). Options sometimes even include gift cards! So you could make a $50 purchase, get your credit card points, get the Rakuten rewards (often 1-10%), plus get $50 back. 🤯
But if you have big purchases planned, look out for spending-based bonuses at other portals, especially those from the airlines. They often offer bonus miles after hitting spending minimums, on top of the miles earned on the purchase. Some airline shopping portals can help you earn elite status, too (including American and Alaska). But if the base earning rate is lower than you can get elsewhere or the points offered are in a rewards program you seldom use, you might want to use another option.
Check your merchant offers
Merchant offers give you rewards or cash back when you use your card with specific companies. This time of year, you can usually find tons of great incentives, even with merchants you’re going to spend with anyway. You can find the offers in your credit card app and click to activate them, although some apps will even activate offers for you automatically. You can also get similar deals by activating offers from SimplyMiles on any linked Mastercard, or activating in-store offers and using a card linked to Rakuten.
Use points (only a few!)
Although you can often use points to make retail purchases, the redemption rates are generally poor—well under the 1+¢ per point you could get when redeeming for travel, or even (with some cards) cash back. However, Amazon often has rotating, targeted offers that allow you to get a discount on your purchase if you use some points as part of the purchase, often only a single point. These appear somewhat often with Amex points and I have seen a few deals with Discover as well. MilesTalk keeps a running compilation of these deals that is well worth reviewing before you check out! If you are eligible, remember that they are usually one-off deals, so if you usually make a number of smaller purchases, you might want to wait to maximize the discount in a single, bigger transaction.
3) Protect your purchases
It’s not just about maximizing rewards. You might want to ensure that your purchases—especially the more expensive ones—are protected against loss, damage, or a giftee that doesn’t appreciate the socks you bought them. 🧦
Purchase protection: compensation for damage, loss, and/or theft within a certain period of time after purchase.
Return protection: compensation if the merchant won’t allow you to return an item (generally, the item must be in like-new condition and certain items are excluded).
Extended warranty: additional protection beyond the manufacturer’s warranty, often for up to an additional year.
Cards vary widely in which of these benefits they offer and the fine print behind them. As a general rule, though, the best terms will be found on premium cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve and Capital One Venture X, so consider using a card like that for more expensive purchases like a Cyber Monday dishwasher.
4) Take it to the next level
If you want to get even more value from your holiday shopping, here are a couple more relatively lazy options.
Use your card’s credits.
Now might be a good time to use the Lululemon or Saks credit on an Amex Platinum, the Best Buy credit from the Citi Strata Elite, or the Peloton credit on a Sapphire Reserve if you’re feeling splashy. You might be able to use Amex’s Resy credits for a gift card. Something tells me a lot of people are going to be getting Oura rings this year.
Snag a welcome offer.
If you have a lot of spending on the horizon, it might be a good time to look for a new card. Those holiday presents can help you hit the minimum spend to earn a hefty welcome offer. (For weekly updates on the best offers out there, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter.)
Look for spending offers.
You might not need a new card to earn extra points with your holiday shopping. Be on the lookout in your merchant offers or email inbox for spending offers. For example, my IHG Premier is currently offering me 5,000 points if I spend $2,500 by mid-January, while my Hilton Aspire offered me 12,500 points for spending $6,500 by December. Those offers don’t make sense for me, but you might have one waiting that fits your spending perfectly.
Lazy Take 🦥
It’s the most wonderful time of the year—but also one of the most expensive. A few simple steps can turn those purchases into rewards—and those rewards into travel.
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