Shopping through portals can be a lot of fun and fairly lucrative. When there are a couple of promotions that come together at the same time, it is even better!
Earn 15X points for shopping through Ultimate Rewards
Great Deal: 15X UR Points and $20 Back
Right now, the Ultimate Rewards portal is offering 15X Ultimate Reward points per dollar spent at eBags.com. That is a pretty good deal by itself – it is a straight 15% rebate if you value Ultimate Reward points at 1 cent per point, but more realistically, it is like a 22 – 30% rebate. Not bad at all!
However, there is another promotion going on right now as well and it is from American Express and their Offers – $20 back on purchases of $100 or more at eBags. Plus, you can count the mile/point you will get using your American Express card as well (yes, Amex cards do earn points shopping through the UR portal).
When we put it all together, the math looks like this (for a purchase of just $100) – 1,500 Ultimate Reward points + $20 statement credit + 100 points on your Amex. When we assign a conservative value to those points, we get something like this – $24 in Ultimate Reward point value + $20 Amex statement credit + $1.30 Amex value = $45.30 in value-based rebates on a $100 purchase. Oh yeah, you get a nice travel accessory as well. 🙂
How To Put It All Together
Register your American Express card for the eBags offer
Sign-in to your American Express account and check the Offers For You at the bottom for the eBags deal. It will look like this:
Register for eBags offer from American Express
Note – this offer expires this Sunday (July 20), so move fast!
Select to save the offer and make a note of which card you saved it to (you may be able to save it to more than one card, if it is offered to your other cards as well).
Login to Ultimate Rewards shopping portal
For this part, you must have an Ultimate Rewards earning credit card to have access to the portal. You will not need to pay with that card, though! Once you sign in, go to Earn Faster and search for eBags to see the offer.
Earn 15X points for shopping through Ultimate Rewards
Note – you cannot use coupons from outside the the eBags website or else you may void your cashback (if an offer is listed on eBags.com, you can use that).
Start shopping at eBags!
Do not forget to sign-up for the eBags reward program to earn an additional 5% in points for future orders!
Now, there may be items that are marked quite a bit higher than other retailers have them listed for. That is definitely not the case with everything, so just make sure you do a little comparison shopping to make sure you have the best price (or at least close to the best price, considering the amount of points you will be earning). The best percentage for this deal is if your order is just $100, but anything over that will still yield some great savings. Just make sure that, to take advantage of the Amex offer, your order is at least $100.
One item that may be of interest is the TravelPro Crew 9 20″ expandable roller bag. It is the same price on Amazon as it is on eBags ($135) and is a closeout item so it is at a pretty steep discount. Also, it is the perfect size (by dimensions given) to accommodate the stricter carry-on bag limits by United and others.
Travelpro Crew 9 20″ roller
Just make sure you move quickly because you only have until Sunday for the American Express offer and you wouldn’t want the UR portal to change their earnings on you either. 🙂 It’s nice when the big boys like Chase and American Express play nice together – it gives us a great opportunity to rack up extra points and cash! Have fun!
I don’t believe you can combine these two offers. The offer terms for purchasing through Chase UR shopping portal requires that you purchase it with Chase credit card.
The $20 off is through American Express card.
I know that is what it says but many people, myself included, use Amex cards through the UR portal and still receive the points. It is just that you won’t be able to argue it if they do not post automatically (I haven’t had a problem, though).
Hello,, can you use this combo to bur eBags gift cards? and is there a way to leverage this offer with mutliple cards?
For gift cards, according to Frequent Miler’s experiments, no, you would not get points from gift card purchases. On the other hand, if you able to register the offer to multiple American Express cards, you should be able to use it several times (once with each card). If you stay near $100 per card/purchase, you could really leverage that into some great point earning!
I believe there is still some question as to whether you’ll get points or not if you don’t use your Chase card when going through the Chase portal.
If you have some uncertainty about it, you could purchase a gift card from eBags with your American Express card for $100 (and then receive the $20 rebate). After that, you could go through the UR portal with the gift card to purchase something (this also works).
Are Ebag gift cards allowed for statement credit purposes?
There is nothing in the terms that prevent it (unless the gift cards are sold by third parties).
Will not a purchase with the $100 gift card at EBags end up “buying down” amount spent at Chase UR portal?
So the $100 gift cert(net $80 from AMEX) knock 1500(100 X 15) UR points off the purchase?
I realize $20 is worth more than 1500 UR points I was just doing the different calculations.
Let me know if I am misunderstanding, but you would still be okay because you can go through the UR portal WITH the gift card and still receive UR points from the purchase (with the gift card). This is based on FM’s laboratory testing.
Does the Chase Ult Rewards shopping portal T&C’s explicitly state a Chase card must be used? Most shopping portals only require membership(usually via a card, I get that part) and a click thru.
I’m sure they are all pretty similar but Barclays Rewards Boost portal pays out extra points for use with ANY card as long as you have one of their cards, enroll in the shopping portal and of course click through to use.
So this is a great deal if one can find something they actually need on eBags (or are a reseller), otherwise hard to take advantage of. About the only thing I’m seeing which are plausible purchases are sunglasses for a little under $100 (but could buy GC and then use GC to earn points). Anyone seeing other good picks? Charles, any running gear? I could actually use some of that.
Matt – that was the first thing I looked for! 🙂 I did find some stuff I will be putting out over the next couple of days. Any running gear in particular that you are looking for?
I’ve actually been running w/o a watch for a while, I think I’m going to grab your basic Timex Ironman to add a little more rigor to my training. Not sure about anything else.
Do you like/prefer GPS watches or not really? I am so addicted to mine that I have a hard time running without it!
I had a garmin for a while, it had trouble picking up my location early on in runs and then experienced some severe malfunctions outside of the warranty period. Since that time I’ve given up on gps watches, though that may be an overreaction.
[…] Part of this valid through July 20 (the American Express Offer portion) Combine an American Express Offer ($20 back on eBags.com purchase of $100 or more) with 15 points per dollar through the Ultimate Rewards Mall at eBags.com. Check prices though as eBags prices some items higher when you shop through an online portal. For more details about this deal, please see Great Deal: 15X UR Points and $20 Back at eBags […]