Slickdeals has launched ‘Slickdeals Rewards‘ in beta. For some time Slickdeals has been offering rebates on certain purchases/sign ups (e.g SoFi Money, HSBC), this Slickdeals Rewards seems to be more like a traditional shopping portal such as Rakuten or Topcashback. Unlike a traditional portal you must download the browser extension. Personally think it’s much better to stick to a traditional portal rather than relying on this as I suspect the rates will be significantly worse than other portals. Even if they aren’t I’d wait for some sort of incentive or sign up bonus before joining.
so when are we getting the DoC reward program?
Let’s see how this goes.
Maybe it’ll be like a few years ago when they did a deal with American Express in offering one of their cards and they paid out the sign on bonus twice. After they realized and admitted the mistake they asked for the second payment back. From what I understand because of the way they paid it out(via PayPal I think) they were unable to force the recovery of those funds. Some paid them that money back but I believe many did not.
ShillDeals
I remember when they shut down a really interesting discussion about link extraction, unescaping links (like SD’s) etc.
Never been back, never will.
This is exactly the kind of behavior that brought down Fatwallet (competitor to Slickdeals, sold to Rakuten and Rakuten shut down the forum feature). FW got greedy and started keeping a lot of commission and people soured out soon.
Fatwallet made a lot of money from the ebates/Rakuten deal. They weren’t “brought down”. ebates had no interest in running a deal forum. So they just killed off that side of business.
Fatwallet was pretty awesome back in the day. I started off my deal hunting way back with Anandtech’s hot deals forum and then Fatwallet came on the scene. They hung around for quite awhile until Slickdeals more or less took their crown.
their extension auto enables cashback upon going to an applicable store site. Thats a huge no-no and may mess up other cash back tracking. Uninstalled
Slickdeals is too greedy to offer competitive rates. I’ve been an active member over 15 years. They’ve lost their ways. Many great deals you will not find posted on their website because it involves cashback which they don’t allow. Mentioning cash back is an offense. Slickdeals was the absolute undisputed king. Now they prioritize profits which leads to inferior deals and many deals that can’t even be shared.
I agree. 8+ years ago Slickdeals was great for finding actual deals, and I was generally happy to let them get whatever their affiliate commission was on the clickthrough. Now there’s regularly “deals” on the front page for $1 off a $20 item. Really? That’s a slick deal?
Though I still check the site daily out of habit… if anyone knows of a good alternative that’s more like SD was back in the day, please share.
Yep. It’s the usual story. All competition died out and then they sold out. Half of their Frontpage is sponsored deals.
Agreed. Miss the old days of SD. Check them out every BF/Cyber Monday and that’s it. Everything is “sponsored deals” now, credit card offers especially all over the place. No thanks.
Where else are you going to go? I only use it for slickdeals alerts at this point.
I’m not aware of a good alternative. I still use slickdeals occasionally. Most of the good deals are burried in deep threads. Generally look for the threads with lots of discussion constantly coming up and up again.
What other deal sites do you track now if not slickdeals?
SD pockets too much commission. Raku, BeFru, TopCB etc are better choices.
Yes they do. If rakuten is paying 15x, does that mean slickdeals is earning 15% commission. It probably does, which is pretty substantial.
Rakuten IMO is the best one for now. Their offer tracking is really good and the terms are crystal clear and above all, they provide MR points.
Slickdeals is still useful, but 99% of their ‘front page deals’ are just garbage sponsored listings now.
I would be extremely reluctant to use this. SD has never been very honest about automatically changing all referrals posted to their own referral links. Perhaps more importantly, SD is not honest about censoring, automatically, any mention of a “competitor”. This fine tradition dates back to the days of FatWallet and continues to the modern day “usual suspects” such as Topcashback, Rakuten, etc. Yes SD has given “cash back” in the form of rebates in the past, however there are plenty of stories of how the rebates have not gone through. SD Inc. has a lavish corporate campus in Las Vegas funded through referrals so I highly doubt they will bite the hand that (literally) feeds them.
Requiring a browser extension means they are also getting your browsing history, and given their history I’d say this means they found a way to monetize it.
I appreciate good honest members of our community such as DoC. I appreciate the honesty here about referral links and know that the payout from the referral source to the blog doesn’t affect editorial decisions like it does with competitors.
Make your own decision whether to enroll in SD Rewards or not, but I agree with William Charles’ concerns.
https://slickdeals.net/f/12673798-where-s-my-rebate
https://slickdealscam.wordpress.com/
Topcashback and Rakuten are the best ones out there. Both take a long time to payout but Rakuten tracks faster…not sure if it’s a benefit when you still have to wait a long time until you receive the money. Rates are slightly better at TCB. Customer service is better at Rakuten.