Inbox Dollars Seems to be Coming Through

The Inbox Saga

We’ve been documenting the story of the 5% cashback offer on all eBay purchases via the Inbox Dollars shopping portal. We first posted about it on 9/9/15 and the eBay category was removed on 10/15/15. The good news is that the cashback now appears to be coming through, hopefully it will be that way for everyone soon.

We reached out to them last week and were told that by 10/19/15 we’d see cashback for all purchases made up through 9/11/15. Many of you may not have any purchases made by that time, but I had two purchases by that time as did some others; the test was on…

New Terms

After 10/19/15 passed and no cashback appeared, I reached out again to Inbox and we also tried making a push on Twitter. They replied on Twitter with an interesting link which no one knew about. Basically, they disclaim there that:

• Not all purchases may be eligible for crediting
• All orders will be validated and approved prior to credit
•  InboxDollars credits Members for completing Offers based on information we receive from our Advertisers. Thus, the Advertiser has the final say in whether or not a Member is credited for completing an Offer. InboxDollars makes no guarantee that Members will receive credit for completing an Offer.

Wow, that is some load of disclaimers.

The most interesting part would be if we can figure out when this page was written. Luckily we can:

It was created on 10/13/15, just two days before the eBay offer was removed completely… (HT: @bem236)

Is it coming through?

At that point, I was pretty sure that something is different in their system and either isn’t awarding cashback properly or will just award for certain categories. In fact, I had a post written up about it which was almost posted a few hours ago.

A new development came today when I got an email back from them that they are crediting my account and $18.50 popped up in my Inbox account.

The big question remained for me whether this was special treatment they are giving me as a blogger to shut me up  😉 or if the cashback is actually coming through automatically.

Interestingly, I got $18.50 for the shopping and I had only requested 5% of $270 (or $13.50) since that was the amount of my purchases from up until the 9/11/15 cutoff. After reviewing my eBay purchases I realized that there was one other $100 purchase made on 9/9/15 and I must have gone through Inbox for that purchase as well. Success! They were crediting me even for purchases I had not mentioned to them at all. It’s working automatically – Yay!

I asked around to see if anyone else also got cashback for purchases until 9/11 and orensmoneysaver has one contact who also got their cashback from Inbox. On the other hand, one Twitter correspondent told me that he did not get cashback for an 8/27 purchase. Inbox replied that reporting is almost complete, indicating that it’s just a matter of time until it comes through.

Based on the above and some other factors, I’m pretty optimistic that it will come through automatically for everyone. There may, of course, be some purchases which didn’t track properly – as with any shopping portal – and then you’ll have to try your luck with submitting a claim for the cashback via chat.

Let us know if it came through for you.

Caveats

Just a brief reminder of a few caveats we wrote previously:

• First, there is $3 deducted at the time of payout. More details in the previous post.
• Second, if you were not active for 10 days they’ll shut down you account. You can easily get it reinstated – cashback intact – for up to 6 months.
• Lastly, yes, they are slow and it may take some more time until we get paid out for all purchases made up until 10/15/15 when the category was removed. The upside is that once it comes through, you can cash it out right away.