Why the payment route decides whether an offer fires
Updated 30 September 2026
An offer can depend not on what you buy but on how the payment is routed. Of the live offers in our database, 1,014 specify a direct card payment, 80 require a UPI app and 39 require the issuer's own shopping portal. Use a different route for the same purchase and the offer does not fire. Offers that fire only on EMI are not counted here and are not published on this site at all: the cap on an EMI offer is routinely several times the cap on the same card paid outright, so publishing the EMI figure as the answer to what a card pays would overstate it for anyone paying in full.
The routes that appear in published terms
Where a route is specified, it is a condition, not a suggestion. The purchase is identical, the merchant is identical, and the reward is different.
| Route required | Offers |
|---|---|
| Direct card payment | 1,014 |
| Via a UPI app | 80 |
| Via the issuer's shopping portal | 39 |
| Via wallet | 11 |
| Via amazon pay | 6 |
| Other, each under 5 offers | 5 |
| Not stated | 10,282 |
| Total live offers | 11,437 |
Issuer shopping portals are the common trap
Several issuers publish their highest rates only through their own shopping portal, where you start at the bank's site and are passed through to the merchant. Going to the merchant directly earns the ordinary rate. The rate on the banner is real, but only on that route.
Wallets and UPI cut both ways
Some offers require payment through a specific UPI app or wallet. Others exclude wallet loads entirely, as covered in our guide on excluded spends. Both statements can be true on the same card for different offers, which is why the route has to be read per offer rather than per card.
What to do about it
For any purchase large enough to matter, check whether the offer names a route before you pay. It is the cheapest check available: it costs a few seconds and it is the difference between the advertised rate and the base rate.
Figures on this page are computed from AskTula's offer database, 11,437 live offers read from published terms across 593 cards and 47 issuers, as read on 30 September 2026. They describe what issuers, merchants and card networks publish, not what any individual card will pay you.