Rakuten Card
From Travel Strategies
Credit Card List (By Bank)
Official Webpage
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Annual Fee
No annual fee
Typical Signup Offer
$10
Signup Bonus ChartBonus Categories
3% or 3x MR on purchases through the Rakuten (eBates) shopping portal
3% Foreign Transaction Fee
The Rakuten card allows you to optimize your rewards on some of your online purchases.
Collecting the Signup Bonus
The normal signup bonus is only $10 on your first purchase. Its better than nothing, but not the reason you would get the card.
Notable Benefits
The Rakuten Card is one of the few credit cards that still offers the full complement of shopping protections: Price Protection, Return Protection, Extended Warranty, and Purchase Protection.
Bonus Categories
The reason to get this card is to earn 3 Membership Reward points (or 3% cashback) on many of your online purchases.
- Rakuten operates one of the best and most popular online shopping portals. When you click through their site to visit the store you want to shop at (rather than going directly to the store's website), you'll earn extra rewards on your purchases. Many online stores pay Rakuten an "affiliate marketing" fee and Rakuten passes some of that back to you. You can also earn rewards through their in-store cash back offers at some stores (that you link to your credit card) and their travel reservation service.
- When you sign up for your Rakuten account, you can choose to earn cashback or Membership Rewards points. If you are willing to invest the effort to use your points for frequent flyer tickets, Membership Rewards points are more valuable. We value them at 1.5 cents each. In other words, if Macy's is offering 4% cash back, you can set up your account to earn 4x Membership Rewards points instead.
- The Rakuten credit card only earn bonus rewards for purchases made through the Rakuten shopping portal. You'll earn an additional 3x MR or 3% cash back on top of the normal shopping portal rewards. In our Macy's example, if you shop through the portal and pay with your Rakuten card, you'd earn 7x MR or 7% cashback on your qualifying purchases.
- You won't earn 3x rewards on all your online purchases.
- Some websites don't participate in the Rakuten shopping portal. For those stores, there is no way to earn the extra bonus credit card rewards.
- Some websites offer better rewards on other shopping portals. If you shop through Rakuten, you'll earn some extra rewards from the credit card, but you'll miss out on some rewards you could have earned from another shopping portal. It might be better to use your general-purpose reward card through the other site.
- Sometimes your purchases don't track correctly (or are excluded in the fine print) and you won't earn either the expected shopping portal rewards or the extra credit card rewards.
- You don't want to use this card for your everyday spending. You'll earn higher rewards from a good general-purpose reward card. Get a Great General Purpose Reward Card and Use It for All of Your Spending.