In a final blow to gift card sellers and deal hunters, eBay appears to have stopped paying out shopping portal earnings for Daily Deals and some other similar promotional offers.
For realz’ this time.
Background
As long as I can remember, the fine print on shopping portals have been going back and forth with different language restrictions as to what will earn portal points/cashback on eBay purchases and what won’t. For example, a couple of months ago Topcashback started to mention the Gift Card category as being excluded.
In practice, I found that the portal usually paid out on gift cards and mostly everything else. Since the eBay portal doesn’t pay out all that much, I don’t track purchase-by-purchase, but overall it was coming through.
(It’s possible the new Computer limitation is really being enforced – no personal experience.)
New Exclusion
The past few weeks a change occurred, and many/all gift card deals we post on the site have not been earning portal cashback. This change affects portal-users and also bloggers who have eBay affiliate links (we’ve seen a big drop in our eBay commissions recently).
My understanding is that the new limit which is being enforced is not gift cards specifically; rather, anything that eBay doesn’t earn commission on, they don’t payout on the portal.
Daily Deals and other promotions are likely included in the new exclusion. But it’s always possible that some deals will work, depending on what rates eBay negotiated with the seller. I’d recommend always clicking through a portal with the hopes that the deal in question will earn portal points.
Shopathome and GivingAssistant clearly mention the limitation that no cashback is earned “when seller fees are $0.00.” Other portals like Topcashback and Ebates don’t mention this, but there’s a good chance that it’s true regardless.
[A report indicates that Mrrebates might still be working recently, so you can try that one for now, but I don’t expect it to last if true. Here is my Mrrebates referral signup link – thanks for using.]
Final Thoughts
This is the third – and final? – blow to the eBay GC reselling community. The first blow came in August when they stopped allowing the usage of eBay gift cards to buy third-party gift cards. Then came the October setback in which we can no longer earn eBay Bucks on gift card purchases. Now, they are taking away the portal from most gift card deals.
Our only remaining prize is earning 5x on e-gift card purchases from PPDG.
Going forward, very few gift card deals will work for reselling purposes, unless you have a bulk seller relationship which pays more than the publicly available rates.
To clarify again, the new rule isn’t related to gift cards specifically AFAIK. Other Daily Deals on eBay won’t earn from the portal either. On the flip side, you should still be able to earn portal points/cash on full-price gift card purchases.
Please let us know your own experiences in the comments. We’ll add this to the list of 34 things to know about eBay and Paypal.
Ebay has not allowed use of any credit card on my last purchase of Lowes and CVS gift cards – the only choice was “PayPal balance”
You can never use a card when you have a Paypal balance. Old Paypal rule.
Withdraw the balance and you’ll be able to use a card.
FH-Thanks for this! I’m going to try for Avios!
ebay is going down the drain. It’s terrible for me to use as a seller as well as a buyer. I use to make $10,000+ purchases from eBay to resell per year. They got to double dip on seller fees that way. Now, they basically kicked away a ton of sellers. I’m about to leave myself. I can hardly find the same inventory that was widely available two years ago. Now all I do is sell things on there. I’ve downsized for the most part and I’m mostly selling items that were returned on amazon for whatever reason back on eBay. I’m pretty much done with eBay.
Isn’t the 5x being recoded?
can someone come up with a competitor to ebay already?
any website that has a “marketplace” or equivalent… amazon, newegg, buydig… those would all work, the sellers just need to go there.
“any website that has a “marketplace” or equivalent… amazon, newegg, buydig… those would all work, the BUYERS just need to go there.”
As a two decade eBay seller I can assure you the only reason most sellers are on eBay is because buyers are there. The vast majority of eBay sellers expend a lot of effort trying to sell on other venues. But the buyers simply don’t visit those sites.
I’ve been using the British Airways portal to earn Avios on my Ebay purchases. It’s been working for me since this summer, just double checked the language there, only thing close is “No rewards are given when using a Discount Code, Coupon or Voucher not sourced from the rewards site.” Like I said though, I’ve been earning Avios on all my giftcard purchases! (Not on Ebay gift cards of course.)
I know Avios won’t be useful for everyone, but hopefully this helps some folks!
Ebay sales are going to take a nice dip this quarter. Everyone in this community went from 5-6k per quarter in spend to maybe a few hundred dollars….that is gonna hurt the top line!
It’s Christmas gift giving time, investors won’t notice the absence of resellers at all. eBay does just about everything it can to discourage sellers (and resellers) alike. I just wonder when it will ever make sense to treat the people that use the service decently. My guess is never.
Yep, if this new way PPDG posts with Chase removes the 5x, that will be the final blow.
Latest PPDG came up as PAYPAL *DGSEBAYUS on ink (new to me)… Waiting to see what category it codes as.
my transaction on 11/16 posted normally as PAYPAL *PAYPALDIGIT (Utilities)… earned 5x and everything.
when did this change? did you get 5x?
thanks
I got 5x on PAYPAL *DGSEBAYUS.. transaction on 11/21
ePN has an RSS feed of non-commissionable deals. I’m guessing one of the portals will turn that into a little form where you can enter the item # and it lets you know if it’s excluded or not. From my experience, it’s about 90% of the deals shown on the deals.ebay.com homepage and quite a few others.
Interesting, thanks