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.
