Glossary · Payments
Merchant Category
A merchant category is how card networks classify what a store sells — for example, restaurants, grocery stores, or gas stations.
Purchase categories decide which spending bonus applies. A card that earns 4× on dining only does so when the store counts as a restaurant, not when the same food is bought somewhere that counts as a grocery or wholesale club.
This is why Costco rarely earns grocery bonuses (it counts as a wholesale club) and why some delivery apps surprise people — the category, not the product name, drives the bonus.
Pikt reads the category from your purchase and chooses your card accordingly, so the card you use matches how the purchase actually codes.
Related terms
- Best-Card Recommendation at Checkout — Pikt recognizes where you're paying and names the best card to use — online via Pikt Checkout before you click pay today; in stores, Pikt Nearby will surface it on your lock screen when you're ready to pay (coming next).
- Category Multiplier — A category multiplier is the rate at which a card earns rewards in a given spending category — e.g. 4× points on dining or 6% back at U.S. supermarkets.
- Reward Routing — Reward routing is the practice of automatically selecting, at the moment of purchase, the credit card in your wallet that earns the most value on that specific merchant and category.