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When an occasion calls for flowers, you generally have two choices: order from a local florist or order online. Assuming you make your purchase with a rewards-earning credit card, you’ll get “regular” points, miles or cash back from the transaction regardless of how you order the flowers.
However, you’re leaving points, miles or cash back on the table if you don’t order your flowers online through a shopping portal. Although this is true for all purchases that can be made through a portal, the cash back, points or miles earning potential is particularly lucrative for flower purchases — sometimes as high as 35 miles per dollar spent.
Why to Use a Portal
If you’re not familiar with online shopping portals, here’s a quick introduction as to what they are and why you should use them.
In short, you can earn cash back, transferable points, hotel points and airline miles when shopping online with select retailers.
Using a portal is easy and doesn’t add much time to your purchase. Generally, you’ll need to register with the shopping portal and then click through to your desired retailer. A cookie will track any purchases you make with the retailer during this session, so you’ll automatically earn rewards on your purchase.
How to Choose the Best Portal
Checking a shopping aggregator site like Cashback Monitor or EVReward can help determine which portal facilitates the best earning for purchases with a particular retailer. So, if you know you want to order from SendFlowers.com, head to one of these aggregators to find out which portal offers the biggest return on your purchase.
You can even create an account with Cashback Monitor to assign specific valuations to points/miles. Feel free to use TPG’s valuations as a starting point.
However, if you’re focused on earning a specific type of bonus provided by a particular shopping portal — perhaps in order to earn points to extend the expiration date of your points or miles — you can always go directly to the portal of your choice.
Browser extensions can help you remember to use portals for your everyday purchases. American Airlines, United and Southwest all have Chrome extensions to remind you when you could be earning bonus miles.
Current Bonuses by Portal and Vendor
Most portals feature multiple flower retailers offering bonuses. These bonuses often increase before Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and other holidays, but here are the bonuses you can generally expect to see offered by each online shopping portal. The value of each loyalty currency is based off of TPG’s latest valuations.
AAdvantage eShopping (1 mile = 1.4 cents)
- Florists.com: 20x miles (earning about $0.28 in value per $1 spent, or 28% return)
- Sendflowers.com: 15x miles (21%)
- FromYouFlowers.com: 12x miles (16.8%)
- 1800Flowers.com: 10x miles (14%)
- ProFlowers: 10x miles (14%)
- The Bouqs: 6x miles (8.4%)
British Airways Avios eStore (1 Avios = 1.5 cents)
- FromYouFlowers.com: 25x Avios (earning about $0.37 in value per $1 spent, or 37% return)
- SendFlowers.com: 20x Avios (30%)
- 1-800-FLORALS: 20x Avios (30%)
- Flower.com: 15x Avios (22.5%)
- ProFlowers: 10x Avios (15%)
- FTD.com: 10x Avios (15%)
Chase Ultimate Rewards (1 point = 2.1 cents)
Earning bonuses can vary across different Chase credit cards, but I found the following bonuses on the Chase Sapphire Reserve.
- The Bouqs: 12x points (earning about $0.25 in value per $1 spent, or 25% return)
- ProFlowers: 10x points (21%)
- FTD.com: 10x points (21%)
- Teleflora: 6x points (12.6%)
Delta SkyMiles Shopping (1 mile = 1.2 cents)
- FTD.com: 20x miles (earning about $0.24 in value per $1 spent, or 24% return)
- ProFlowers: 6x miles (7.2%)
United MileagePlus Shopping (1 mile = 1.4 cents)
- FTD.com: 20x miles (earning about $0.28 in value per $1 spent, or 28% return)
- 1800Flowers.com: 15x miles (21%)
- Sendflowers.com: 8x miles (11.2%)
- FromYouFlowers.com: 6x miles (8.4%)
- ProFlowers: 5x miles (7%)
- The Bouqs: 3x miles (4.2%)
- Teleflora Flowers: 750 miles per order (worth about $10.50)
Deciding Which Card to Use
Some spending categories, like dining or travel, have many credit cards that offer extra rewards for spending that falls into these categories. Flower purchases, on the other hand, fall solidly into the non-bonus-spending category. Luckily, the following cards still feature solid earning for non-bonus categories:
Bottom Line
While you should always use a portal when shopping online, using an online shopping portal is especially lucrative when purchasing product — like flowers — that offer high rewards. Remember to start by using a shopping aggregator site like Cashback Monitor or EVReward to determine which portal provides the best rewards for particular retailers.
Source: thepointsguy.com