There’s a lot of comments regarding online about improperly tracked purchases after clicking through the portal. Today, I want to explain how I do it with a high level of success without needing to file a missing claim. To date, I’ve had trouble with Hotels.com tracking on both the Ultimate Rewards mall and TopCashBack.
Let’s start off with the portals that I use the most in no particular order:
- American Airlines AAdvantage E-Shopping Mall
- Chase’s now rebranded Shop With Chase
- TopCashBack
- BigCrumbs
- UPromise
- Discover’s now rebranded DiscoverDeals
We all use various web browsers, my go to application is Google Chrome on both Windows and Mac OS and this post will walk through discussing Chrome, but other popular browsers like Firefox have it as well so you would need to check what their nomenclature is.
There’s a feature embedded into Google Chrome that allows you to login with your GMail account. I have four separate accounts logged in. One specially for the blog and the other three accounts for other purposes. After watching the movie Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime, seeing this article on Wall Street Journal, and this TV show Allegiance I’m going to use some “spook” language in this post as part of the theme. I do my “intelligence gathering” in my main account. This way, I “won’t be made” in the other browser accounts. When I say I won’t be made, it means that I do not want the other accounts to know that I was on a retailer’s site which potentially causes havok on a tracked purchase.
After I spot an excellent deal, depending on where I am, I may do two options:
- Use a different account in the aforementioned method
- Use Incognito browsing
The Incognito browsing is my main method for Internet purchases using my main account. It’s insanely quick to open a new browser then go to the portal and click through to make the purchase.
Why Complicate Things?
I purposely use multiple accounts for Chrome because many financial institutions have enabled extra consumer protections where logging into a computer for the first time, they need to authenticate your identity. When I use portals that have that verification, I authenticate once and have it registered on a browser account. Then use that browser account without needing to do that every time in Incognito mode.
I use the Incognito method when no second step verification is needed.
Conclusion
It’s easy for your system getting “burned” where the portal won’t pay out because of previous browsing activity. So you need to make sure you take every precaution to protect your identity and “assets” (portals) to get paid out. I don’t have a 100% success rate for tracked purchases, but this has helped tremendously. Oftentimes, my purchases that don’t track because I’m trying to do some “techint.”
I had a lot of fun using the spy terms and you should read this list for a dictionary of terms.
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