Gift Cards on eBay – Changes to Shopping Portal Cashback

Gift Card Removal

It has come to our attention a new exclusion for portal earnings on eBay: the gift card category. Only Ebates and Fatwallet have removed this category from earning cashback; Topcashback, Befrugal, and the other portals have not.

What was?

  • eBay gift cards have always been excluded from earning cashback from most portals.
  • Ebates and Fatwallet did not mention any such exclusion at all.
  • All portals earned cashback on third-party gift card purchases on eBay.

What is now?

  • Ebates and Fatwallet don’t offer cashback on the entire gift card category.
  • Topcashback and Befrugal offer cashback on gift cards with the exception of eBay-branded gift cards.

What’s the actual reality?

My guess is that Ebates and Fatwallet have not actually coded their system to reject giving cashback on gift cards; they just don’t want to deal with missing cashback claims. They probably got a lot of those with the recent 4% cashback offer on the Gift Card & Coupon category (including a $36 claim from yours truly) and they aren’t interested in having to deal with that again.

So where does that leave us?

  • Topcashback, Befrugal and the others will officially offer cashback on third-party gift cards. Unofficially, eBay e-gift cards will hopefully still earn cashback, although you won’t be able to file a claim if something goes wrong.
  • Ebates and Fatwallet won’t officially offer cashback on any gift cards purchased on eBay. Unofficially, you’ll still get cashback on third-party gift cards and probably even on eBay gift cards. (Rumor has it that you may unofficially earn cashback even on the purchase of physical eBay gift cards by going through Ebates.)

That’s my best guess on how it will look going forward.

Ebates – Fatwallet Brotherhood

Ebates and Fatwallet seem to always run their eBay cashback program with the exact same details. For example, when Ebates was offering 5% on the Gift Card & Coupon category on eBay, Fatwallet was too. And a different time they were both offering 4% as well. And they both stopped their 5% or 4% at the same time. And now they both removed the Gift Card and Coupon category from earning portal cashback entirely.

A reader pointed out to us that Ebates bought Fatwallet back in 2011. As an aside, Ebates (along with Fatwallet) was bought out by Rakuten in 2014.

Remember also that there’s a deal going on now where you can buy $100 eBay gift card for $95.

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17 Comments
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brito11
brito11 (@guest_132112)
June 10, 2015 11:27

Used fatwallet portal to buy an ebay gift card and that one tracked as 0 cashback,

brito11
brito11 (@guest_138072)
June 25, 2015 16:56

This was an e-gift card.

fater
fater (@guest_129424)
June 5, 2015 13:30

is there any portal that is giving cb for buying vgc at staples?

Bryan
Bryan (@guest_129333)
June 5, 2015 10:10

They probably don’t want to pay out the extra 3% on gift cards they advertise for those of us who have a Ebates Visa card. That amounted to 7% just from Ebates alone on gift cards when they were running the 4% promotion.

Hustlehard
Hustlehard (@guest_128820)
June 4, 2015 13:43

Didn’t help 5x ebay bucks and 10% off a 1000 purchase happened at the same time. I can only imagine the amount of ebay and target cards they paid out on. Not counting any of the svm or paypal deals.

stvr
stvr (@guest_128806)
June 4, 2015 13:06

Why did you have to file a claim? Why do you think it didn’t track?

Jan
Jan (@guest_128805)
June 4, 2015 13:05

Ebates actually bought Fatwallet in 2011.

Dan
Dan (@guest_128789)
June 4, 2015 12:35

Seems pretty odd to me to be offering a very high 4% CB on gift card category and then suddenly ZERO percent. Perhaps you’re right, they got burned somehow during the promotion.