The Offer
United has a Spring shopping portal bonus for this week and next:
- Get 1,000 bonus United miles when you spend $350 shopping through the shopping portal
- Get 300 bonus United miles when you spend $150 shopping through the shopping portal
The Fine Print
- Valid from 04/02/17 through 04/14/17 at 11:59:59 pm ET
- Earnings are in addition to the standard MileagePlus miles earned from shopping online through the MileagePlus® Shopping mall
Our Verdict
This offer is pretty good and certainly better than last week’s United offer. Utilizing this offer, you’ll get almost 3x extra per mile, on top of the standard portal earnings. As always, be sure to check the best portal rates on an aggregation site.
Hat tip to Dealswelike
View Comments (5)
I want to take advantage of this deal, but I don't need to buy anything. What are people buying to make use of this deal?
Make sure to use mpx app too. In the example they showed you would get an additional 1050 miles for that $350 purchase.
You'd be opening up a whole new can of worms if you want to talk about options for buying gift cards for actual use (such as the MPX app).
Rarely is MPX ever the best option for GC purchases. Let's take your Macy's example: you can almost always do better than 3x UA by buying from GC exchanges, and if you don't want to buy from the secondary market, there's always 5x UR through Ink Gyft (if you don't mind putting it on your yearly cap).
Finally, if you want a CC's benefits to apply to the purchase (purchase protection/price protection/return insurance etc.), remember that you'd have to charge at least part of the purchase amount to that CC. Most benefits will only insure you for the amount that was charged to the card.
Agree with the last comment but with mpx you would get 3 miles per dollar plus the 25% for the United card plus the miles for whatever card you use. Minimum that's 4.75 less than 5 extra with ink at office max but close and could be better depending on card used. Your points are all valid but I do find mpx to be an easy way to get extra miles. Far easier than planning in advance to get x amount of gift cards for x purchase and walk around with those.
Yes, when compared to Gyft, MPX does have the advantage of being able to match your purchase amount exactly vs. having to purchase fixed denoms (Macy's for example is limited to multiples of $25).
The CC rewards part is a good point though, especially if you want to put that organic spend towards a particular CC's min. spend. Wouldn't be able to work on min. spend if using Ink.
Do note that you wouldn't have to plan in advance and walk around with GCs purchased beforehand if you stick to primary dealers with instant delivery like Gyft/MPX and some secondary dealers like Raise and giftme.