I was afraid this would happen.
Neiman Marcus are clawing back the shopping portal rewards earned on gift card purchases since gift cards aren’t technically eligible for portal rewards.
Many of us are buying Neiman gift cards to take advantage of the $50 off $200 Amex Offer currently available. There were also a couple juicy portal deals for Neiman with 15x United and Alaska miles on the purchase.
Reports from readers and on Frequentmiler’s lab indicate that these milage portals are getting clawed back. The reports we have so far are from Cartera milage portals, but there’s good reason to believe that many other portals will claw back too. Dealswelike on Twitter heard from Topcashback that they will not be paying out either. (I suspect they emailed her due to her blog post on the subject.)
Some data points seem to indicate that purchases made from January 17 and prior to this Amex deal aren’t being clawed back. Of course, we won’t know for sure until it gets paid out.
It’s worth noting that many/most portals always had a gift card exclusion in the terms, and thus the claw back is fairly straightforward. I recently learned that not all portals had the exclusion, so it will be interesting to see how those portals respond to the issue. I also wonder what will happen with bank portals since those often post to your account very quickly and might have already been cashed out.
Pretty sure that TCB, SAH, and Cartera portals always had the gift card exclusion. Those were the portals most people used, and they’ll probably all be clawed back. 😥
The gift card reselling community keeps growing, and merchants are increasingly realizing the portal-GC angle and shutting it down as Amex Offer deals come out. This happened with Sears, Nike, and now Neiman. Probably others too.
The Neiman deal might still be profitable, although even that is getting difficult. Try checking back in a month or so to see if rates got better. I suspect the enthusiasm for the deal will die down without the portal and the rates might rebound a bit.
