When buying third-party merchandise on websites like Amazon, Walmart, Sears, or eBay: do shopping portal rewards track for these third-party vendors? Can you use a gift card as payment?
Yes, both portals and gift cards should work.
I’m aware of four such marketplaces that offer portal rewards and allow gift cards: Amazon Walmart, Sears, and eBay.
- eBay is entirely third-party sellers (eBay doesn’t sell anything themselves) so obviously portals and gift cards work for any seller.
- Portals and gift cards work on Amazon for third-party sellers.
- Portals and gift cards work on walmart.com for third-party sellers. [Gift cards work, and thanks to Orensmoneysaver (via personal message) for the data point that portals work too . His specific data point was with the Discover portal, but there shouldn’t be any difference.]
- Portals and gift cards work on Sears for third-party sellers. [At least they used to as of a couple years ago.]
If anyone has counter data points or data points on additional third-party marketplaces other than the four mention, please comment below.
Thanks to reader munna for bringing up the question
Thanks Chuck!
Topcashback (usually the most generous one) shows:
“Terms & Conditions and other useful information
What could stop me from getting cash back?
Cash Back is only paid on legitimate Winning Bid or “Buy It Now” transactions. Cash Back is not available on bids placed with a sniping service/tool.”
But once an offer is accepted, I wonder, does it then turn into a Buy it Now transaction?
I’ll ping their CS and see what they say. The problem with pinging CS is that different reps say different things, you never know whether they know what they’re talking about or not.
Just as an FYI for everyone – Topcashback got back to me with the following: “I have had a look into this for you and it should be enough if you click through before you make the offer however there would be no harm in you clicking through before you pay as well to be on the safe side. While I can’t comment on how ebay would categorize their transaction types I would assume that once the offer has been accepted, it would then act like a buy it now transaction.
The same goes for when you place a bid.”
Hope this is helpful to someone.
Does anyone know what the correct point in the “best offer” process is for logging into ebay through a portal? Is it when you place an best offer, or is it when the best offer has been accepted and you go to pay? Or both?
Similarly, what about when placing a bid? When bidding, or when paying?
Or do portals only work when using “buy it now”?
Many thanks.
My guess is when you pay. Think there’s something in the fine print of some portals about this question.
I would be interested to know how this is for airline/bank shopping portals – I didn’t read the T&C for the Avios shopping portal before using GCs on a fairly large purchase. It was a no go, unfortunately.
Assuming if I would pay with a gc for a purchase on best buy I won’t receive any cash back through shopping through them?
Also is there any post of yours with cashbacck sites that are ligit ,like ebates I know is real, but I’ve seen other Cashback sites which offer more, but didn’t want to take a risk not knowing if it’s a real site or not, if there’s no post on this any way to put one together? Thanks
Usually you DO earn portal rewards when paying with a gift card. Ebates won’t follow up if cash back didn’t post automatically, but it’ll almost always work even with Ebates.
As for your second question: I assume the sites shown by Cashbackmonitor are all fine. The big ones are: Ebates, Topcashback, Shopathome, and Befrugal. I’ve also used Mrrebates and Upromise and some more. And of course there are tons of legit mileage sites like United shopping, AA shopping, etc. And there’s lots of credit card shopping which are of course legit, like Discover Deals, Citi, etc.