Ebates Canada: 5% Cash Back on eBay.ca – My Canadian Experiment

5% on eBay

Ebates.ca is the Canadian Ebates site. They are currently offering 5% cash back on all eBay.ca (Canadian eBay site) purchases.

Direct Link (here’s my Ebates.ca referral link)

The fine print excludes Ebay gift cards, but nothing else so I assume third party gift cards are included in the deal. Update: A friend pointed out that ‘Everything Else’ is actually the name of a category on eBay (see the bottom of this page). As such, it’s more likely that Ebates.ca means to offer 5% on the ‘Everything Else’ category, and the Gift Cards category will just earn the regular 1%.  😥 Should still work for any other purchases in the eligible categories.

The Canadian eBay site has SVM and Paypal Digital Gifts as sellers there, and some gift card deals found on eBay.com are there as well. I saw the Southwest deal and the Exxon deal there, for example.

You need to open a new Ebates.ca account. You’ll get a $5 bonus after making a $25 purchase. I included my Ebates.ca referral link above and I appreciate if you use it (I think I’ll get $10 CAD per referral, or maybe more depending on how many referrals I have).

No word on how long the 5% eBay rate will last.

Caveat

You do not earn eBay Bucks for eBay.ca purchases. By using a higher cashback rate on Ebates.ca, you are losing 2% in eBay Bucks. You’re only getting an extra ~1.7% over what you could get on eBay.com after factoring in the Bucks and portal.

I mainly tried it as an experiment to see how it goes. It also can be a great deal for someone who maxed out eBay Bucks already.

Also note that a maximum of $50 Cash Back may be earned on any single purchase, same as on Ebates.com.

Miscellaneous Points

• You don’t need to open a new eBay account – just use your regular eBay.com credentials, and the purchase will show up in your regular eBay.com history.
• You DO need to signup for an Ebates.ca account. I chatted with them and confirmed that it’s fine to have an Ebates.com account and an Ebates.ca account, and you can use your regular USA address too.
• I wonder if this eBay.ca trick can help us dealing with random eBay or Paypal problems. For example, it might get us around the limit of 2 purchases per day imposed by eBay for some people. Most likely it won’t help us with PPDG problems since that’s probably tied to the Paypal account.
• I do not recommend using eBay.ca to circumvent eBay purchase limits. People have been banned for opening multiple eBay accounts to get past limits, and this might result in the same.
• You may lose a bit from the payout since it will payout in CAD. Make sure to choose Paypal to receive your Ebates.ca payments so that you don’t have to deal with depositing foreign currency checks. (Disclosure: I don’t know anything about depositing foreign checks, it may not be hard or expensive at all.)
• We can’t use USA eBay gift cards on the Canadian site.

My Experiment

Personally, I bought $100 Southwest e-gift card from PPDG for $90 and paid with my INK card. It comes up the same as the regular PPDG charges. I’m guessing there aren’t any foreign transaction fees even if you’d use a card that has those.

In any case, any small $25 purchase will trigger the $5 signup bonus, and any amount over $5 gets paid out quarterly (same as Ebates.com), so I’ll get that much even if I never use the portal again.

I should get around $5.75 CAD ($4.50 USD) in cash back from the $90 purchase.

Hat tip to axIguy on r/churning