Ebates Acquires Cartera – Many Major Portals Now Under their Control

Ebates has acquired Cartera Commerce, a leading provider of loyalty marketing solutions and rewards programs.

Press Release

For the uninitiated, Cartera is one of the biggest shopping portal networks. They are the engine behind cash back portal Splender, as well as most milage shopping portals like United, Southwest, Alaska, Delta, and many more. They also run some dining programs as well.

Ebates, or course, is one of the biggest online shopping portals. Ebates was bought by Rakuten in 2014 for $1B. And they own Extrabux and Fatwallet as well.

With this purchase, Rakuten and Ebates now have a huge e-commerce domination. Ebates is easily the most well-known online shopping portal and the cash back portal most people start out with, and Cartera controls most major loyalty shopping programs.

As someone who primarily uses cash back portals, this is bad news for me. First, there’s simply less competition. There’s a chance we’ll see Splender set their rates to Ebates’ rates (similar to how Ebates and Fatwallet used to have the same rates). Under the current system I find Splender often has higher rates, but Ebates has great temporary promotional rates, so by shopping around we end up earning nicely. Once they are combined, this might not happen as much.

For all we know, the entire Splender portal could fold into Ebates, similar to what happened with the Fatwallet portal. My guess is that this won’t happen. Hopefully, they’ll continue to run Ebates as before and Splender as before to maintain both market segments, and we’ll be able to take advantage of the best rates of both.

Most people use Cartera’s milage portals, and for them I don’t see any real indication that there will be big changes in the making. We shall see.

Hat tip to @travelwithgrant