Best Rate Guarantee
A few of the major shopping portals offer a guarantee to match the best rate available, see Highest Cash Back Guarantee for Online Shopping Portals. Befrugal, Shopathome, and Topcashback all offer this match, but the Topcashback offer was really the sweet one since they matched almost any portal, an unlimited number of times. Conversely, Shopathome only matches the bigger shopping portals and Befrugal only honors one claim per merchant.
Topcashback Changes Terms
The gravy train has now come to an end and Topcashback has now added new terms in the guarantee to only include the bigger shopping portals. (Link)
Here’s the list:
- Befrugal
- Ebates
- Extrabux
- Fat Wallet
- Mr Rebates
- Shopathome
This puts Topcashback exactly on par with Shopathome and it, in fact, makes Shopathome even better due to the fact that they add on a bonus when matching other portals.
The eBay 5% Angle
This is bad news all over, but where it hits particularly hard for us right now is the fact that the Inbox Dollars shopping portal is currently offering 5% back on all eBay purchases, see 5% Back on all eBay Purchases with Inbox Dollar Portal. Since we aren’t familiar with that portal, we advocated going through Topcashback and getting matched instead.
Under the new terms this will not work as Inbox Dollars is not one of the portals eligible for matching. We’ll need to go through Inbox Dollars itself to get the 5%. While no one has yet gotten their purchases showing in the Inbox Dollars account, we’ve already confirmed that the purchases are tracking properly, including gift card purchases, and we hope that there should not be any hitch with the payout there.
Note that we don’t know exactly which date Topcashback changed the terms. I’m going to try filing some claims and ask them to match it based on the old terms and see how it goes. It will probably get initially declined, but hopefully they’ll give us some leeway since they just changed the rules.
HT: orensmoneysaver
[Disclosure: The Inbox Dollars link is my referral link and I’ll get a bonus if you signup using the link.]
