Program Guides
The Aeroplan eStore: Great for Earning, a Trap for Spending
The Aeroplan eStore is two products wearing one name, and they deserve opposite verdicts. As a way to earn points — click through the portal before shopping online — it's free money on spending you were doing anyway. As a way to spend points on merchandise and gift cards, it pays roughly 0.5–0.9¢ per point against the 1.9¢ we value Aeroplan at on flights. Use it to earn. Almost never use it to spend.
Earning: the portal, the button, the stack
The eStore is Air Canada's online shopping portal: sign in with your Aeroplan account, click through to one of 200+ retailers — Apple, Amazon.ca, Sephora, Lenovo, Indigo, GAP — and earn Aeroplan points per dollar on top of whatever your credit card earns. The base rate is 1 point per dollar (pre-tax, excluding shipping), with retailers regularly boosted to 3x, 5x, or short-lived 10–20x promotions.
The earn stacks three ways:
- The portal rate — 1 to 10+ points per dollar depending on the retailer and promotion.
- Your card's earn — pay with an Aeroplan credit card and its regular rate applies on top; see our Aeroplan card ranking for the current field.
- Elite status — Aeroplan Elite members earn an extra 2 points per dollar on all eStore purchases.
During a strong promotion the combined rate on the right purchase can pass 13 points per dollar — roughly a 25% return at our valuation, on shopping you'd have done regardless. The Aeroplan Shopping Button (a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge) removes the only real friction by prompting you whenever you land on a participating retailer.
The gotchas that cost people points
The eStore's complaints department exists for predictable reasons. Points post slowly — pending within days, but final confirmation routinely takes six to eight weeks, and missing-points claims are only accepted ten or more weeks after purchase. Tracking breaks silently if an ad blocker interferes, if your cart predates the click-through, or if you check out in a retailer's mobile app — app purchases don't track; use the retailer's website in the same browser session the portal opened. And the points math excludes taxes, shipping, gift-card purchases, and (at some retailers) whole product categories.
Spending: where the value evaporates
The eStore also has a redemption catalogue — 2,000+ merchandise items and gift cards priced in points. This is where a points balance goes to lose half its value. Current examples, checked against cash prices:
| Redemption | Points price | Cash price | Value per point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple MacBook Pro 16" | 589,500 | $4,649 | 0.79¢ |
| iPhone | 159,900 | $1,399 | 0.87¢ |
| $25 gift cards | 3,500 | $25 | 0.71¢ |
| Prepaid credit cards | — | — | ~0.63¢ |
| Air Canada gift cards | 200,000 | $2,000 | 1.0¢ |
Against our 1.9¢ Standard valuation on well-booked flights, a 0.7¢ merchandise redemption throws away almost two-thirds of your points' value. A 589,500-point MacBook costs points that could cover roughly $11,000 of business-class flights booked well. The one defensible row is the Air Canada gift card at a flat 1.0¢ — the same as Aeroplan's baseline flight floor, useful only if you want to lock in value before points expiry and have no trip to book.
The one-sentence policy
Earn through the eStore aggressively; redeem through it never — points leave your account at full value only when they buy flights. If you're weighing what your balance is actually worth, run it through the calculator in our Aeroplan guide.
Earn rates and redemption prices verified July 11, 2026 against the eStore and independent coverage; retailer rates and promotions change weekly — check the portal before assuming a rate.