Best EVER $50 Referral Bonus to Join Rakuten AKA How To Get Rewarded For Shopping
Did you know that there’s a way to earn cash back when shopping (at retailers such as Safeway, Target, Sam’s Club and many more)? And by joining Rakuten now and spending at least $50, you can earn the best ever $50 referral bonus.
If you don’t use a referral bonus to join Rakuten, you will earn a welcome bonus of $10 vs the typical $30 bonus that using a referral will get you. Sometimes there are elevated welcome referrals of $40 but this is the highest bonus that Rakuten has ever offered!
So you are asking yourself what Rakuten is a shopping portal that allows you to earn cash back when booking travel, doing your holiday shopping or even opening bank accounts! If you are doing any of these activities, it will be eye opening to see how much money you could be putting back in your pocket!
Is This Legit?
I am sure that the first question that you are wondering: is this even legit? Maybe it seems a little too good to be true or maybe a little sketchy?
The craziest thing is that I don’t only use Rakuten and actually predominately opt for the American Airlines shopping portal for those miles and my status.
And the $1,764.63 is the amount that has been paid – showing that Rakuten really does work and that I have received the cashback as promised and advertised!
How does it work?
If you’ve never used a cash-back shopping site or are just curious in general, you may be asking yourself how this works so here you go:
- If you are new to Rakuten,you can get $40 for signing up!
- You will then search for the merchant on Rakuten to see if they offer cashback (ie unfortunately Costco and *Amazon are two popular retailers that do not participate -*every once in a while, you can earn some cashback when Amazon pops back onto the portal but it’s not often)
- Either click on the Rakuten extension and activate the cash-back for the store OR Click on the store to activate cash back on the app*
- Rakuten will add a ‘tracking cookie’ as you make your purchase on the merchant’s site
- Once the purchase is processed and the order information is sent to Rakuten, you will be notified that cash back has been added to your account.
- You get paid by Rakuten every three months for any cashback earned and confirmed
Beautiful Tip: I strongly suggest using the app for your purchases as the tracking is more seamless but if choose not to or like to shop from a computer, you should definitely add the Rakuten extension to Chrome (unfortunately Safari security makes it harder to track purchases so I use Chrome if shopping via browser).
Another question you may have what is the cost? There isn’t any as it is free to join and there are no fees to use!
TLDR version: You shop with one small difference being that you do it through Rakuten. They get paid by the store for your business and then pay you in return for shopping through them – this is why the tracking cookie is so important!
Earn Cashback On Shopping
Today happened to be an extra cash back day so there are elevated (higher multipliers) for many merchants but these are a very small sampling of the stores you will find.
Earn Cashback On Travel!
- Lodging: Booking through Hostelworld, IHG or Marriott
- Airfare: Buying a flight from British Airways, Icelandair or Qatar
- Cruises: Purchasing from Celebrity, MSC or Princess
- Travel Experiences: Using Viator or GetYourGuide to book excursions or tickets
Since there are over 3,500 merchants on Rakuten, there are so many opportunities to earn cash back and perhaps on things you hadn’t considered before.
There Are So Many Other Opportunities To Earn As Well
Some of the products/services that you may not have realized that there’s a chance to earn cashback on:
- Banking and Finance: Opening an account with SoFi or Filing taxes with TaxAct or Signing up for Intuit Quickbooks
- Holiday Gifts, Flowers & Parties: Ordering flowers from FTD / Teleflora or Ordering party supplies from Oriental Trading Company
- Auto & Tires: Ordering tires from Discount Tires online to Buying online from Advance Auto Parts
- Electronics: Getting a camera or lens from Canon to Buying VPN from Surkshark
- Digital Services & Streaming: Taking an online course from Craftsy to Signing up for DirecTV
- Events & Entertainment: Buying concert tickets from Ticketmaster or Livenation
- Subscription Boxes & Services: Trying out a meal delivery service like Blue Apron or Signing up for a box like FabFitFun
- Sports, Outdoors & Fitness: Buying a Peloton bike or tread
- Computers & Tablets: Getting a new computer or phone
Beautiful Tip: Get in the habit of checking Rakuten before making a purchase (or having the extension installed) to ensure that no Cashback opportunities are missed!
You Might Even Be Able To Earn In-Store and Whilst Dining!
Rakuten now offers the ability to earn cashback while shopping in-store with some retailers and the process is super easy since you don’t have to worry about tracking cookies
The big thing to remember is that you have to ADD YOUR OFFERS otherwise you will not get credit for a shopping or dining trip even if the credit card has been offered
Wait / Look For Even Higher Cashback Multipliers
If there is not an immediate rush to purchase a good or service, it can be very rewarding to wait until cashback amounts are higher ie instead of 2% for booking transportation through Viator, you wait until the cashback is 15%.
The highest cashback %, I have seen for most merchants in the past 17 months has been on Online Monday (the Monday after US Thanksgiving/Black Friday) but again this only makes sense if there is not an immediate need AKA there’s no worry that something will sell out!
Beautiful Tip: Many Mondays will have cashback specials of double to 10% to 15% so delaying a purchase by a few days or weeks can yield very high dividends.
MORE DEALS: Rakuten Weekly Big Deal + Annual Big Give Week
Every Wednesday there is an elevated cash back deal – Viator was at 22% one week and another week SoFi had a monster $400 cash back!
The annual Big Give Week had cash back from 15 – 20% for many stores!
Getting Paid Your Cash Back
So now that we have gone through how to shop through Rakuten and how to maximize your cash back even further, you may be wondering how you will actually get paid for your earned cash back.
Rakuten calls their payouts “Big Fat Checks” and pays out 4 times a year, in three month intervals:
- May 15th
- August 15th
- November 15th
- February 15th
As long as your account balance is over $5.00 you will receive a payment for all cash back and rewards earned and confirmed in the previous earning period.
There are three ways you can get paid out by Rakuten:
- Paper check in the mail
- Paypal direct deposit
- American Express points
Updated 2025: Rakuten now offers the ability to get paid instantly if you redeem your cash back as a gift card.
Note that your cashback will first be listed as pending and will become confirmed after certain criteria have been met including Rakuten receiving payment from the merchant, the return window has elapsed, etc.
Why You Should Do This
Maximizing your spend is making the money that you were going to spend go even farther. And to alleviate your disappointment that you are now just discovering this: June of 2023 was when I started using any shopping portals so don’t feel bad. It’s always better to start late than never at all!
Beautiful Tip: Do not spend more - use this as a way to earn Cashback on what you were only going to spend money on!
New to Rakuten? Earn $40! Earn the BEST EVER Referral bonus of $50
What’s the extra $50 I speak of? Once you spend $50, you’ll get $50 simply for signing up using my link.
***This is their highest bonus EVER and only available until 9/30/25! Make sure to sign up before then as you’ll have 90 days to make at least $500 in purchases – the $50 is IN ADDITION to all of the cashback you will earn on your purchases! The typical offer is $30 so you’ll need to spend $30 in the first 90 days and elevated referral bonus has only been as high as $40!!***
