A number of readers have emailed me lamenting the impending demise of Shop Discover…
Shop Discover has long been one of the best cash back portals. It often offers the best cash back rates. And, Discover Cash Back can be redeemed for many partner gift cards at better than one to one value. See, for example, Discover rental car discounts and upgrades.
Fortunately, Shop Discover won’t really be gone. It’s simply changing form into Discover Deals.
Discover Deals is the combination of two old Discover programs: Shop Discover and Discover Extras. The former is/was an online shopping portal. The latter is/was a way to link deals to your Discover card for automatic savings when you use your card. Now, both ways to save are included in one site.
Here’s an example. On the Discover Deals site, when I searched for 1800Flowers, I found two offers:
The first offer, for a $10 Cashback Bonus, is an automatic credit that is earned when making a qualifying purchase at 1800Flowers. The second offer, for a 20% Cashback Bonus, depends upon clicking through from Discover Deals and checking out at 1800Flowers. The two offers can be combined. Click through the 20% bonus offer to 1800Flowers and spend the required $39.99 on your Discover card to activate the $10 bonus. You should get both the 20% Cashback portal bonus and the one time $10 Cashback bonus.
One downside to this new combined approach is that its more difficult, in my opinion, to find the deals that are triggered automatically by using your Discover card. On the other hand, I suppose there is an added efficiency to seeing all of the offers together in one place.