In a final blow to gift card sellers and deal hunters, eBay appears to have stopped paying out shopping portal earnings for Daily Deals and some other similar promotional offers.
For realz’ this time.
Background
As long as I can remember, the fine print on shopping portals have been going back and forth with different language restrictions as to what will earn portal points/cashback on eBay purchases and what won’t. For example, a couple of months ago Topcashback started to mention the Gift Card category as being excluded.
In practice, I found that the portal usually paid out on gift cards and mostly everything else. Since the eBay portal doesn’t pay out all that much, I don’t track purchase-by-purchase, but overall it was coming through.
(It’s possible the new Computer limitation is really being enforced – no personal experience.)
New Exclusion
The past few weeks a change occurred, and many/all gift card deals we post on the site have not been earning portal cashback. This change affects portal-users and also bloggers who have eBay affiliate links (we’ve seen a big drop in our eBay commissions recently).
My understanding is that the new limit which is being enforced is not gift cards specifically; rather, anything that eBay doesn’t earn commission on, they don’t payout on the portal.
Daily Deals and other promotions are likely included in the new exclusion. But it’s always possible that some deals will work, depending on what rates eBay negotiated with the seller. I’d recommend always clicking through a portal with the hopes that the deal in question will earn portal points.
Shopathome and GivingAssistant clearly mention the limitation that no cashback is earned “when seller fees are $0.00.” Other portals like Topcashback and Ebates don’t mention this, but there’s a good chance that it’s true regardless.
[A report indicates that Mrrebates might still be working recently, so you can try that one for now, but I don’t expect it to last if true. Here is my Mrrebates referral signup link – thanks for using.]
Final Thoughts
This is the third – and final? – blow to the eBay GC reselling community. The first blow came in August when they stopped allowing the usage of eBay gift cards to buy third-party gift cards. Then came the October setback in which we can no longer earn eBay Bucks on gift card purchases. Now, they are taking away the portal from most gift card deals.
Our only remaining prize is earning 5x on e-gift card purchases from PPDG.
Going forward, very few gift card deals will work for reselling purposes, unless you have a bulk seller relationship which pays more than the publicly available rates.
To clarify again, the new rule isn’t related to gift cards specifically AFAIK. Other Daily Deals on eBay won’t earn from the portal either. On the flip side, you should still be able to earn portal points/cash on full-price gift card purchases.
Please let us know your own experiences in the comments. We’ll add this to the list of 34 things to know about eBay and Paypal.Â
