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.
DP: Cashback from BeFrugal was confirmed after 3 months (16.60 USD on 200 USD purchase of GC). Cashback from TCB was declined.
On a deal like this why not just buy something? I got a pair of $450 shoes for $146, $96 after the rebate. Threw in some makeup I was going to buy anyway to get up to the $200 purchase required. I feel like I made out like a bandit!
DP: Cashback clawed back from 5 NM GC purchases from January 17th. Too bad 🙁 but not surprised.
Should add that it was TCB.
Yeah, TCB clawed back. Really too bad.
NM clawed back my two GC orders on TCB today.
Same here. Makes me with I had used Ebates instead.
Ebates will claw back eventually as well I imagine.
If anyone still needs to sell NM GCs, I sold 4 on raise fairly easily. Got about $12 profit per and all sold within 4 hours.
They also clawed back all 12k of my AS points.
Too many circles and arrows on this deal. Of course Neiman noticed.
I think they would have quickly noticed with the amount of volume regardless of circles & arrows. Obviously the circles & arrows contributed to that volume, but I don’t think it would have worked regardless.
Problem with GCZ is they might just randomly cancel your order with no reason provided if they have too many.
Regarding making money of the N-M Amex offer: Giftcardzen is still offering 83%. The only problem is they take 4-6 weeks to pay out.
TCB still hasn’t paid out for 5B GCM purchases back in December, either, when GCM had those big deals. Still showing as pending on my account. If that gets clawed back too then I’ll stop using TCB for good.
TCB lists the rate for VGCs at GCM (love those TLAs!). I just got paid for some non-5B’s I purchased in November.