Final Post on Inbox Dollars

5% on eBay

We discovered a shopping portal which was offering 5% back on eBay at one point and for a while many of us made use of it for our eBay purchases. The problems started when they weren’t paying out apparently and we wrote up about that a few weeks back. This post is just an update of where things stand.

This will be the final post on the topic; if there’s anything to add, I’ll just add it to this post or in the comments.

Mixed News

Some good news and some bad news regarding payout from Inbox.

The good news is that they do seem to have tracked most purchases. And they do seem to be willing to actually pay out for whatever they have to.

The bad news? 

• They are not paying out without a claim. They’re apparently trying to minimize their expenses by only paying out for those who follow up with claims. There were a few earlier purchases which perhaps tracked automatically, but none of the later ones did and most people don’t have anything that tracked automatically. This isn’t the end of the world but is obviously a pain to deal with.
• Multiple reports indicate that they are denying any eBay purchases paid for with a gift card. This is disappointing since many of us use gift cards for eBay purchases. Again, they’re apparently trying to minimize their payouts this way. We should note that BeFrugal also writes such a rule regarding eBay purchases which are paid for with an eBay gift card. Also, Ebates has a general policy not to honor claims for any purchases on any site paid for with a gift card and this is actually enforced for purchases which don’t track automatically. (See also Best Shopping Portal for eBay Purchases.)
• One person (I can’t find the link right now) was denied due to the fact that the name of the purchaser and the name on the Inbox account are different. This excuse is absurd.
• Some transactions weren’t tracked properly. They are saying they’ll follow up with eBay on those.

You’ll definitely need to submit a claim with the date and amount of each purchase. They’ll probably ask you to submit the order confirmation emails and possibly the shipping confirmation as well. Go figure. The bottom line is that they apparently resigned themselves to payout when they have no excuse not to.

The best we can do is submit all our purchases and hope it comes through. In the end, it sounds like many people have been getting all of their cashback by filing claims and some people got part of it. This is encouraging.

Note that we were using the portal until 10/15/15 when the eBay category was removed. Most reports indicate that they are now okay with a 30-day wait before submitting claims and we can hopefully file claims now for all purchases made through 10/15/15. You can file a claim via chat (you may have to disable a pop-up blocker to do so).

One Final Caution

Inbox is very trigger-happy to shut down accounts for a slight infraction of their rules, even the rules relegated to the fine print that you never knew existed. A number of people got their accounts shut down and thus any funds confiscated for violating terms they didn’t know about. They legitimately need to be concerned about duplicate accounts and the like, but they won’t even give the benefit of the doubt or second chances before closing your account.

A few important rules: you can’t have more than one account per household or per computer or per mailing address. Logging in from out of the country may be problematic and don’t try changing any details when you request a check (i.e. if the name you gave them is a nickname and you want the check to have your legal name). You can see all their rules here.

Tread carefully.