Ibotta Review – Earn Cash Back for Store Purchases and Online Shopping (Up To $40 Sign Up Bonus)

August 8, 2019
52 Comments
by Chuck

Update 8/8/19: Sign up bonus is now $20 if you complete 10 offers in the Ibotta App, in-store or online, within 14 days of registering. You can also get an extra $8 by redeeming 40 offers by 8/31/19 and another $12 if you redeem 70 offers by 8/31/19. Hat tip to Maximizing Money

Update 6/5/19: Ibotta is offering a share of $100,000 when you refer at least three friends in June. Feel free to share your referrals in this linked post. You’ll also earn $3 per referral. You can also use our links:

Ibotta is a site which offers rebates and cash back for in-store purchases and online shopping. It functions primarily through their app.

In-Store Rebates

The majority of the site is dedicated to in-store rebates which offers cash back when you purchase specific items from a participating store.

After saving a specific deal in the app, proceed to buy the product and get cash back into your Ibotta account. You might get $.75 back on the purchase of Kleenex tissues, $.25 back on milk, or $3 back on a case of beer, for example.

Always make sure to save – ‘Unlock’ – the deal before making the purchase. Go to the Unlocked Deals tab in the app to see which one’s you’ve already added. Once added, it doesn’t need to be added again until it expires.

They often make it a hassle to save the deal, especially for the better deals. Sometimes they’ll make you watch a two minute video, for instance, before being able to save the deal. Or they might make you answer a question about whether this is the first time you’re buying this product.

How to find a deal

Most deals are specific to a given store. Before shopping in Walmart, browse the Walmart section of the app and see if there’s a deal on any products you’re planning to buy. Alternatively, you can search by category, such as Grocery or Clothing, for all items in that category from all stores combined.

To be eligible for the rebate, items need to be purchased at specific stores. Usually, the deals are specific to one store (Target, Sears, Giant, etc). Other times you can get the rebate by purchasing the item at any partner store. Here is a list of all ibotta store partners. Look at the offer details carefully before buying.

Confirm your Purchase

In order to confirm that you purchased the item and thus qualify for the rebate, Ibotta requires one of two things:

  • Link your store loyalty card before the purchase (e.g. you Plenti card for Rite Aid or SYW for Sears). This option is only available at select retailers.
  • Scan the barcode and submit receipts after the purchase.

For products which need receipt submission, they need to be scanned into Ibotta within 7 days of the purchase and before the offer expiration date which might sometimes be just one or two days away.

Generic Offers

Aside from the item-specific offers (milk, Kleenex, etc.), we’ll occasionally see an offer to get a few dollars off any purchase at a given retailer. For example, there was once a deal to get $5 off $50 for any Staples purchase or $5 off $100 for any Best Buy purchase. Currently, I see $20 off $100 for any Orvis purchase in-store.

These offer are way more useful since they’ll work for anything purchased at that store.

Shopping Portal

Ibotta also has a shopping portal for select merchants with competitive rates. The portal is only found in the app, not on the computer. They did add a Chrome browser extension which works for some retailers for computer shopping.

Before we dive into their portal rates, here’s how to find the available shopping portal merchants. Go to the bottom of the home page in the app and click on Mobile Shopping > All to see all merchants. You can also pull up a specific online retailer that from the search bar in the app.

Portal Rates

There are currently around 25 retailers on their shopping portal; it’s by no means a full-scale shopping portal.

I checked through some of their portal rates and there are very good deals available.

eBay: One interesting portal deal is a 2% eBay cash back rate which is a bit higher than other portals. You can either click through Ibotta to the eBay app or shop within the Ibotta app on eBay. I’ve used both of these options and they’ve consistently tracked the portal properly. There is a limit of $10 per transaction, though, so keep that in mind for large purchases. [There is one bug I bump into sometimes when shopping within the Ibotta app, without the eBay app, where the system wouldn’t allow the purchase to be completed properly. Might be better to use the eBay app option.]

Here’s a sample of some other attractive portal deals:

Note all these portal offers and rates can change at any time. Our goal here is to give a sample of the opportunities. And, as always, be sure to cross-check on Cashbackmonitor to make sure another portal isn’t offering more.

And readers note that some portal rates only work once. After using it one time, the cash back rate showing in the app changes for the worse.

Pay with Ibotta

Ibotta also sells gift cards which are instantly available in the app. More information on that in this post.

Teamwork

Another feature of the app, called Teamwork, is to connect with friends and become one group for earning targets. If the group meets certain hurdles you’re all eligible for a bonus. For example, you might be offered a bonus if the team collectively redeems $6 in rebates during the calendar month.

There are numerous bonus levels. The bigger the team, the faster and easier it is to meet finish Teamwork levels.

The person who referred you is automatically on your ‘team.’ You can also add teammates by connecting Facebook, Twitter, email, text and more.

Signup Bonus

There’s a $10 bonus when signing up for Ibotta, whether you use a referral or not. To qualify, you need to complete your first shopping trip within 7 days.

Other necessary conditions (as I understand it):

  • The rebate must be a specific-item rebate, not a generic “Any Brand” or “Any Item” rebates. This might exclude online shopping portal cashback as well.
  • You must login on a unique mobile device which has never been associated with Ibotta before.

After I signed up, I got another offer sent via email that after earning the $10 during the first week, I’d be eligible to earn another $5 during Week 2 and another $5 during Week 3. Total bonuses of $20. Keep an eye out to see if you get that offer too.

Be sure to read the signup bonus details carefully as they can change at any time.

Referral Bonus

You can refer friends to Ibotta and get a $5 bonus with each qualifying referral.

A few conditions necessary to get the $5 bonus:

  • Your friend needs to be eligible for their $10 signup bonus by completing a shopping trip within 7 days. If they don’t do that, you won’t get a bonus.
  • The rebate must be a specific-item rebate, not a generic “Any Brand” or “Any Item” rebates. This might exclude online shopping portal cashback as well.
  • Friend must login on a unique mobile device which has never been associated with Ibotta before.

The $10 signup bonus of the new member is the same whether they signup with a referral or without one. The only advantage for the new member is that by using a referral they’ll be automatically be part of the same Team as the referrer (see Teamwork, above) which might result in some extra rewards down the line.

Feel free to leave you Ibotta referral on this dedicated page. Please don’t leave them in the comments of this post.

Cashing Out

There are two options for cashing out your Ibotta balance: Paypal or Venmo. Both require a $20 minimum to cash out. Another option is to get merchant gift cards instead. These also have a $20 or $25 minimum so I don’t see why anyone would choose that.

Keep in mind there is a $3.99 monthly fee deducted from the account for inactive accounts.

Your Ibotta balance is only viewable in the app, not on the website.

Our Verdict

Personally, I find the whole app way too confusing, though admittedly I’m new to it (I signed up a couple weeks ago) and I’ve only spent a couple hours poking around.

The in-store deals which require linking or receipts are too time-consuming for me given the small reward. The more generic offers that come up occasionally (like $5 off $50 on anything at Staples or Best Buy) I can see as being more useful. Readers add that the alcohol or beer offers are the most lucrative.

The thing that catches my eye is the online shopping portal. While ibotta doesn’t have a lot of portal merchants, the one’s they do have are highly competitive and can offer significant savings. Much as I hate needing to check another portal which doesn’t show on the aggregation sites, it’s worthwhile to keep in mind.

My appreciation if you use my Ibotta referral link when signing up.

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