Doubling of Discover Portal Cashback – How Long Do We Have?

Background

Discover is running a generous promotion offering double cashback to cardholders for their first card year. For cashback from ordinary credit card spend, it’s a lukewarm deal – it ups the rate from 1% to 2%, bringing it on par with what other cards offer.

More interesting is the other rewards offered by Discover which will also be doubled:

  • Discover Deals shopping portal – doubling the rate for a whole year is awesome!
  • Quarterly categories – going from 5% to 10% is significant.
  • Refer-a-friend – the bonus will be $100 after getting doubled, instead of $50.
  • Apple Pay promo – brings up the cashback rate from 10% to 20% (this deal is now over).

The double cashback offer initially broke on June 1, and at the time, even existing cardmembers were able to enroll manually in the promo. That ended on June 24th at which time the offer was limited to new cardmembers only.

Exact Dates of Promo

Remember that the Double Cashback promo runs for 12 statement periods. If your statement runs from the 15th to the 15th, for example, and you chatted to enroll on June 1, then they enrolled you beginning June 15th, 2015. All cashback will be doubled from your July 15, 2015 statement through your June 15, 2016 statement.

All of us who enrolled in the Existing Cardholder offer will get the cashback doubled either from the July 2015 statement through the June 2016 statements, or from the August 2015 statement through the July 2016 statements.

How Much Longer Do We Have for the Portal Doubling?

Recently, Discover Deals has become spectacularly hard to figure out. They stopped sending the quick confirmation emails which used to come within a week or two, and they’ll now send it about two months after the purchase. On the following statement, the cashback should show up as payable.

Other new oddities of the Discover portal include getting the wrong amount of cashback, or even getting double cash for the same order. And they can’t tell you which date or transaction the cashback is for, it’s “Not Available.” Weird stuff.

What’s important for us, though, is the two-month delay in getting the cashback confirmations. Theoretically, the doubling can go by purchase date, but it’s likely that they’ll double the year’s actual cashback. Any cashback showing on your 12 eligible statements will be doubled.

Using the example we mentioned earlier, with an end-date of June 15th, 2016, any cashback posting by that date will qualify for the bonus. For it to post by June 15h, the purchase would have to be made probably before mid-April, since it usually posts around two months after the purchase.

We only have a couple of months left for the portal doubling bonus.

Silver Lining?

Conversely, this is a boon for portal cashback earned right before signing up for the promo. So long as the cashback posted on statement between July 2015 and June 2016 (or, for some people, between August 2015 and July 2016), it’s likely to be doubled.

In practice, this isn’t quite as good as it sounds. Previously, portal cashback was posting quickly, very quickly. Since Discover is a credit card company, they’re able to issue the cashback right away, and just claw it back in the event of a return. They don’t have to worry about the customer running away with the cash like most portals do.

This brings us to a conspiracy theory that perhaps the whole delay mechanism added recently by Discover is to limit the amount Discover Deals cashback they have to double. This helps them both for those who signed up as existing cardmembers, and going forward for all new cardmembers. Instead of having to double 12 months worth of portal cashback, they only have to double 10-months.

Is this the real reason? I don’t know. But it certainly works to their advantage.

Maxing out the 5% Categories Early

On a similar note, if you’re interested in maxing out your Q2 2016 5% category of restaurants and movies, it would be prudent to do so a few days before the statement closes. Discover is known to often credit the last few days on the following month’s statement, and you may not get that cashback doubled.

I’m hopeful that they’ll be willing to manually credit the double cashback for such a scenario, but I’m more skeptical as to whether we’ll be able to get manually credited for portal cashback.

You can leave your Discover referrals in the dedicated post.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

7 Comments
newest
oldest most voted

Jay
Jay (@guest_273125)
July 5, 2016 19:43

Double cashback bonus posted today. (Existing cardholder, got enrolled around same time last year).
Bonus show up as:
“Cashback Match Match Award”

Steve
Steve (@guest_226297)
February 16, 2016 20:47

I purchased some appliances from Sears in Q4 on two different cards, one was an older non-double cash and one was a new double cash back. I received double cash back in rewards for the non-double cash back card and only single cashback for the new double cash card (rest will post in 9-10 months). It baffles me how they could make a big mistake like that – $200+. I also got the 5% category bonus in addition to the 10% Discover Deals promotion (20% with double cash back). So with the ShopYourWay, I effectively received 31% cash back.

iahphx
iahphx (@guest_224538)
February 10, 2016 19:44

Discover’s cashback is such a train wreck that I’ve lost interest in the program, after getting the card last September. I’m pretty sure they still owe me a bunch of Sears cashback. Something seems to have trickled in — it’s very hard to tell with Discover — but I’m also certain I haven’t gotten it all.

I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I do wonder if their pathetic tracking of cashback is meant to discourage the gamers from using their offers. If so, it’s working!

escot
escot (@guest_225448)
February 13, 2016 10:31

“train wreck” indeed…. it’s almost like they’re still owned by Sears. 🙁 I too have been getting some seriously delayed (though at times quite positive) postings of cash-backs I’d long since given up on…. (remember those 20% 800 flowers portal deals? yup, posted almost 3 months later…. even as I’d used a non discover card…..) But all in all, the sheer lack of transparency and fickleness of the discover brand, the lack of timely tracking…. have taken a toll. I know there’s no annual fee on this card, but this is one that when the first year is up… so am I.

Evan
Evan (@guest_224361)
February 10, 2016 14:12

Huh. Interesting. I received a “stray” email about a month ago for a Sears purchase. In my case too, there was no date/transaction information, but from the cashback amount I could tell it was for a gc reload I did about 2-3 before the email verification. Since gc purchases had already been excluded from their cb terms at the time of my purchase (I was running a test), I thought that eventually getting the cb was due to some glitch. Guess not?

Ben
Ben (@guest_224258)
February 10, 2016 11:15

Interesting about the silver lining, I did notice that portal cash back are taking a lot longer– up to the point where I don’t even remember using it or if it even went through (since I have ad-blocker installed).