Reposting this because people received more e-mails about it as per TaggingMiles.
The Fatwallet shopping portal is closing down, and they are directing everyone to use sister-site Ebates instead. They also offer a $10 bonus when you transfer your Fatwallet balance to Ebates.
Background
Fatwallet is a deals and personal finance site, somewhat similar to Slickdeals, with more of a personal finance bend to it. They’ve also had their own shopping portal as part of the site.
Back in 2011, they were bought out by the Ebates shopping portal. Ebates, presumably, wanted Fatwallet due to the many affiliate links that are included in all the deals posts, and due to the active shopping portal that Fatwallet themselves offered.
Since then, Ebates and Fatwallet each provided separate shopping portals. Most of the time, they offered the same rates, and, for that reason, we usually don’t hear people referring to the Fatwallet portal as we’ll just mention the better-known Ebates portal instead. Personally, I have used both portals since once-in-a-long-while the two portals had disparate rates.
Fatwallet Shutters Portal
Sometime within the past day or two, Fatwallet shut down the shopping portal part of their website, with an eye – perhaps – on focusing the site on deals, similar to Slickdeals which doesn’t have a public shopping portal.
Check out the difference between how the home page used to look a few days ago and how it looks now.
They aren’t calling it a shuttering of the portal, rather that the portal is moving over to sister-site Ebates. You might get this popup when visiting Fatwallet:
As part of the shuttering of the portal, there is no longer a refer-a-friend bonus for referring someone to Fatwallet.
$10 Bonus to Migrate to Ebates
If you have a balance in your Fatwallet account, you can choose to cash out the balance directly from Fatwallet or to transfer the balance over to Ebates, either a new or existing Ebates account. If you opt to transfer the balance over the Ebates, they are offering a $10 bonus.
- Transfer your Fatwallet balance over to Ebates, whether a new or existing Ebates account, and get a $10 bonus after spending $25 within 90 days.
Anyone can signup for an Ebates account and get a $10 bonus. What is unique here is that they are offering the bonus even for existing Ebates users. I assume this $10 bonus is only being offered to someone who has a balance in their Fatwallet account, but it may they are offering it to everyone so check out your Fatwallet account and see if there’s an offer for you.
My Experience
In an attempt to take advantage of the $10 bonus, I tried going ahead and transferring my balance to Ebates. This offer came at a good time for me since I have $105 balance in my Fatwallet account that I didn’t know existed. (It was from one of those unusual times that Fatwallet was offering a higher rate than Ebates.)
Oddly, when I went through the process, the system only gave me the option to open a new Ebates account, not to transfer the balance to my existing Ebates account.
I tried selecting, ‘Create New Ebates Account & Transfer Cash Back’ with the hopes that the system would subsequently ask me if I already have one. To no avail – it instantly created a new Ebates account using the same email and password as my Fatwallet account.
I suspect that this is because I have different email addresses associated with my Ebates account and my Fatwallet accounts. To avoid this, I recommend making sure that both email addresses are the same and then hopefully it will go seamlessly for you.
Now, I’ve contacted Fatwallet to try getting my two Ebates account consolidated, and hopefully keeping the $10 bonus offer in the process, since I know Ebates doesn’t like when people have more than one account.
