Following up to make sure you get portal miles

The other day, United was offering 12x miles for purchases made through their shopping portal

(SEE ALSO: Earning miles through shopping portals)

Combined with double dipping (buying gift cards and then returning through the portal to buy merchandise) and the 5x offered by the Chase Freedom bonus categories this quarter, you could make this worth 29 miles for each dollar spent!  It actually may end up being more, because as I’ve found before, shopping portal points post on the price BEFORE you apply any Sears SYWR rewards.

(SEE ALSO: Sears Shop Your Way points – what to do when they expire)

(SEE ALSO: Sears Gift Card verification – how to get your gift cards ASAP)

(SEE ALSO: My experience with 19x points through shopping portals at Sears)

My Sears shopping strategy

I will write a separate post when I am done, but I ended up buying $1500 in Sears gift cards (to get the full Chase Freedom quarterly bonus).  I bought a few things over the next couple of days, but was not able to fully liquidate the gift cards (as there weren’t that many deals to be had).  My plan is to just hold on to those and buy things to resell as there are good portal bonuses over the next few days / weeks.

What to do when portal points don’t post in a timely fashion

I generally try to keep a spreadsheet of the miles that I am expecting so that I can make sure that they all post.

My 4 actual purchases posted within a few days ago, and I received notification that the 12x bonus miles had posted (for 2148, 2148, 2999 and 2999 miles respectively).  But the actual gift card purchases had not posted, which was a big deal (since $1500 * 12 miles = 18,000 United miles in the balance!)

I had read some things about not getting portal miles if you buy the wrong kind of Sears gift cards, and got nervous that I had somehow done that.  I believe that’s if you go to sears.com and then go to their “gift card mall”, which is where you can buy other 3rd party gift cards – those purchases are fulfilled by a different company so not eligible for the portal bonus miles.

So I logged on to United’s shopping portal, and sent them a message.

Cartera responds

(Almost?) all of these shopping portals are run by the same company, Cartera.  Within a day or so, I got a response back from them.

Thank you for your time and patience regarding your pending reward.

Please know that I verified that your miles are in the final stages in order to be posted.

Please allow more time, they will be posted shortly as you ca[sic] see below.

She then included a line from what looked like a spreadsheet, showing my $1500 purchase and 18,000 miles as pending in their system.

Coincidence?

I always find it a bit “strange” when things just HAPPEN to magically post right after I call / email to complain or inquire about them.  I get the feeling that companies like Cartera or other mail-in rebate companies just automatically deny a percentage of these rebates, and have the policy to just automatically accept them if someone complains.

I don’t know if that’s what happened here, though I have my suspicions…  Anyone else have similar experiences with rebates or shopping portals?

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