For years, one of the best consistent shopping portal deals was to shop at Kohl’s through the Ultimate Rewards Mall. Ever since I first used the Ultimate Rewards Mall in 2011, Kohl’s has offered 10 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar.
On Thursday, people started noticing that Kohl’s had begun to disappear. At the time, if you logged into the Ultimate Rewards Mall with an Ink account, you would still see Kohl’s at 10X, but if you logged in with a Freedom or Sapphire account, Kohl’s was missing. Then, sometime on Friday I think, Kohl’s disappeared from Ink logins as well.
Is this loss temporary or permanent? I don’t know. For now, the best alternatives such as TopCashBack at 7% or Ebates at 6% can be found here. If you need Kohl’s gift cards, try going through a portal to Staples and pay with your Ink card. That way you can earn portal points or cash back plus 5X with your Ink card for an office supply purchase.
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For the record, my points did eventually post – very late, but they did.
Great!
Hey Greg, I solved this mystery. 10x is gone because chasingthepoints reported an exploit (see his post from today). rather then fix it, they shut down the portal partnership all together. did you know about the xploit? i did, and knew it would die, but didnt think death would come from a points blogger. kind of ironic if you ask me.
Yes I knew about it because 2 years ago I stumbled upon it myself. I find it very unlikely that Chasing the Points is the reason they left the UR mall, though. I think its a coincidence.
none of mine hit either….
Has anybody contacted Cartera over the missing miles issue? Plenty of contact info on page 2 here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milesbuzz/1530358-cartera-how-does-work.html
Sadly, none of mine have hit yet 🙁
Partial good news…. All of the points from Kohls purchases over the last month that never posted… hit my account today. Raises the possibility there was a tech glitch & kohls was taken down from UR mall until it was corrected?
@Bryn
Generally speaking, no you can’t combine multiple portals.
There are sometimes other ways to “double dip” the amount of points you get. Check out FM’s Laboratory for specific retailer information.
https://frequentmiler.com/laboratory/
I am new to this. Can you go into portals like ebates and use the ultimate rewards mall. Making it double the bonus
No, the merchant tracks the portal you came from in order to pay the portal a commission for the sale. They’ll only pay one portal for each sale.
I also had quite a few purchases waiting to be credited in the period Kohl’s stopped reporting sales – I wish this would come back – but I have a feeling someone at Kohl’s finally realized either 1. combined with coupons, this was either not or not very profitable for the company, and 2. this resulted in two much resale activity that could have been taking away from legitimate purchases from Kohl’s.
I think they ought to rejoin the UR Mall, and although all of us would love it if they did at 10 UR/$, based on probably why they dropped it, it would likely make sense for them to do so at a lower rewards level – maybe something like 5 UR/$ – in line with what JC Penney and Sears are offering or have offered (even though they have at times gone much higher than that) – something that would still entice individuals at the UR mall to shop at Kohl’s while making it less lucrative for some of the resellers.
I remember when I used to get 7 UR points per dollar at Staples Copy & Print ordering stuff for work! I ran up a pretty good account until that offer one day disappeared from the UR mall. It has yet to reappear after almost a year. I would put my chips on Kohl’s either not returning or returning at about 2-4 points per dollar.
I made $500 in purchases last week the Kohls was still available. Hope I still get the points and I also hope it’s temporary. We’ll have to wait and see…
My friend was making 1mm UR per month, as buying and reselling though kohls was his business.
No more, unfortunately.
Maybe it got shut down because of people like your friend.
Hey, at least the guy was making $10k a month selling and reselling stuff. The problem is of course his income is purely at the mercy of how much these shopping portals dole out, in addition to other external market forces. This guy will not last very long.
RIP
The products sold at KSS are such crap, that even their gift card rack is an embarrassment.