EBates or Rakuten which is a popular cashback website, now lets you earn Amex MR points instead of cashback option. Isn’t it Awesome! Ebates is now merged with Rakuten. Here is how you can earn a sign-up bonus of 1500 Amex Membership points with Rakuten.

If you are not familiar with Rakuten, its the largest Cash Back site which partners with over 3,000 of biggest name brands like Macy’s, Kohl’s, Walmart, Sephora, Shoes.com, H&M, Amazon, and more to bring you Cash Back, coupons and promo codes…all for free. You just click through links found on Rakuten and then shop on the stores’ websites like you normally would. You literally get money back for the shopping that you were already going to do.

Don’t forget to use Rakuten when you shop Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals! Rakuten will be running double cash back at all their partnered stores.

Sign-Up Bonus Amex MR Points 

  • Use the link (referral link, hope you can use ours).  It will show below pop-up, ignore that, you can switch to the American Express Membership Rewards account in the next steps.

  • After launching the link, Overlay with the below link in a browser (this is the important link to get MR Rakuten account).  If you already have an ebates or Rakuten account, give a new email id, to get the sign-up bonus 1500 Amex MR points.

                                      https://www.rakuten.com/american-express

  • You will be asked to link to the existing American Express account. It instantly links and you will see a confirmation message.

  • Make a purchase for a minimum $25 within 90 days using the Rakuten link for the 1500 Amex Membership Bonus Points.
  • NEW Info: If you already have an account with Rakuten and it shows a regular cashback account. Go to Account Settings and switch to Membership Rewards Account. Opening with new email id as Rakuten Amex MR account will help to keep two different formats, maybe in the future, they can have different promotions, it will help switch between these two.

The sign-up seems to be pretty simple, just log in using new email id and link to your Amex login account. Overlay with the Amex link given above.

Here is the best part of this Rakuten Amex MR account, you can use any credit card for your regular online purchase and still earn Amex MR. This is a great way to earn multiple rewards like if you combine with certain Chase Ultimate reward cards.

Ebates or Rakuten Amex MR Promotion

This is only for new account promotion of 1500 Amex MR points once you make a $25 purchase within 90 days of sign-up.

Refer Friends and Earn 2500 MR Points

After making $25 purchase you get 1500 points as initial bonus. You can now earn 2500 MR points as a referral bonus. Just ask your friend or family to follow the below steps to refer to friends. If you follow the regular link, you get $25, not the 2500 MR points.

  1. Goto to this page and get your standard referral link.
  2. The referrer should use the regular referral link and then overlay with the url  https://www.rakuten.com/american-express to get a referral. Ebates uses cookies that are stored in the backend.

Once your friend makes $25 purchase within 90 days, you will get 2500 points added to your account.

Conclusion

This is an awesome way to earn MR points, as Amex doesn’t have any online portal to earn MR points like Chase UR for online shopping. The only drawback, you will have to create a new account. Anyhow, who cares if we earn MR points for online purchase which is valued at 2 cents per point.