Back in November, we wrote that eBay apparently stopped paying out the portal for Daily Deals purchases. eBay does not earn any commission on Daily Deals so they didn’t pay the portal. These include many discounted gift card deals which usually come out on a weekly basis.
Based on the past month or two of experience, it seems that most or all gift cards are tracking again on the portal. The change is pretty surprising, and I don’t know the backend story behind it, but the facts on the ground indicate that portals are virtually always tracking now for third-party discounted gift card purchases.
You’ll still see the Gift Cards category excluded from some portals, and you’ll occasionally see an exclusion of products “when seller fees are $0.00” which usually refers to the Daily Deals, but in practice, gift card purchases (and probably all Daily Deals purchases) are coming through. I don’t know if Bullion works or not.
Another interesting development is that we’ve reviewed two newer portals who are offering a slightly higher cash back rate for eBay than the standard portal offering of ~1%. Yaarlo offers 3% and Ibotta offers 2%. Just note that ibotta has a $10 max per purchase, and purchases over $500 won’t get full cash back with ibotta. All other portals have a $50 max. My first Yaarlo purchase has gone from pending to confirmed, I’m just waiting to hit the payout threshold to cash out.
Theoretically, you should be using a portal like Ebates which doesn’t mention these exclusions in their eBay cash back so that you can follow up in case it doesn’t track. My personal recommendation is not to follow up on missing cash back in order to help preserve the portal for the long term. With that in mind, it might not matter if you use a portal with exclusion or without.
While the portal or eBay isn’t huge at 1-3%, it helps enormously since it often helps make an INK deal break-even versus a money-loser.
Update 2/28/17: It seems Topcashback has just cracked down on this and even removed all pending cash back. As far as I understand, this is a portal-specific crack down, not related to eBay themselves.
View Comments (14)
just had a recent gc purchase via yaarlo track at 0 points :(
ebates lists out the categories in which it pays out. Gift cards isn't one of them. I always thought that with ebates, if it wasn't listed, it was excluded.
That's a good point
All of my recent ebay transactions from topcashback.com disappeared. Seems like they clawed back all the gift card purchases.
Yes . Even my confirmed transactions have disappeared from TCB .
Same here. Everything going back to January 6th is wiped out. Glad I cashed out just before that.
Looks like it's over.
Yeah, I'm hearing/noticing that too. I think it's just a TCB crackdown for now. I'll add a note to the post.
Do you think it is because of your post . These transactions were posting find since atleast December and were confirmed also . Now after this post , TCB has withdrawn the cashback.
If it was because of the post, then they are very fast! Typically, it'd take a few weeks for such a decision to happen, not a few days. But it's not impossible.
This is similar to NM amex deal. TCB was quick in removing cashback for NM giftcards. Seems there IT is more efficient than banks like Citi.
Naw, that took a couple weeks.
It would be pretty amazing if TCB saw this post, passed it up to powers-that-be, sent over to their data team to see what is effected, sent info back to powers, made decision to remove portal cashback, sent command to tech team to do that. And got that all done in around 18 hours.
I'm not saying it can't be, just saying I'm a bit skeptical.
So I just noticed that Yaarlo changed their exclusion language for ebay to say "Cash Back is not available on the purchase of gift cards" instead of "ebay gift cards". Does this likely mean, daily deal gift cards on ebay will not track anymore?
I saw that too. I'm guessing they don't want to deal with missing cash back claims. We'll see, I wouldn't be surprised to see more movement on the Yaarlo front. It's a risk, but I'm hopeful.
Interesting -- especially if cashback on third-party gift cards will consistently work again on ebay. Honestly, the savings seem to modest to "make a habit" out of buying gift cards on ebay (unlike the days when you could use discounted ebay gift cards to buy discounted third-party gift cards), but I could envision some limited-time-and-generous cashback offer to make this worthwhile.