United MileagePlus Shopping Portal Alerts System
One of the best ways to juice up your earnings is through mileage shopping portals. From their everyday payouts to their seasonal bonus opportunities (like the current Back to School promos), they can be a great way to rack up thousands of miles.
Sites like Cashback Monitor have good monitoring tools which allow you to track portals and stores so you are notified when increased payouts happen. One of the limits of Cashback Monitor is the number of portals/stores you can monitor. Now, at least one mileage portal is including tracking of their own.
The United MileagePlus Shopping Portal now allows you to select your favorite stores by “hearting” them. The portal will then monitor these stores and email you when they have an increased payout through the portal. As they put it:
Stay up-to-date with your favorite stores. Simply select the stores you like by clicking the <3 (heart) icon. We’ll send you email alerts when they’re offering extra miles.
How to Select Favorites
As described above, the process for selecting favorites is quite easy. Simply login and click the heart icon next to your favorite stores. You will then see each store you select in your list of favorites as shown below. For the record, Walmart is far from my favorite store. 😉
Other Mileage Portals?
While the mileage portals from Southwest, Delta, American and Alaska are all run by the same company, I do not believe they have this feature as of yet. Those portals do have a “favorites” list, but it seems to be comprised of stores at which you have shopped before.
My Strategy
I am glad this alert system has been rolled out and hope it spreads to other mileage portals as well. While I will still check Cashback Monitor before buying anything, I do plan to set these alerts. This system is also nice since I can choose to monitor other portals through Cashback Monitor given the overall limit of 8.
Conclusion
I suspect those who are heavily invested in the United MileagePlus ecosystem will really enjoy this since it is far simpler than Cashback Monitor. For the rest of us this alert system is still useful and hopefully it becomes the new norm with shopping portals.
What are your thoughts? Will you use this alert system or stick to your current methods of finding out about payouts. Are there any other tools worth checking out? Let us know in the comments!
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Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
