The Splender shopping portal will no longer be an option after March 30.
In January, Ebates acquired Cartera Commerce, a leading provider of loyalty marketing solutions and rewards programs. Cartera runs most of the airline shopping portals, and in November 2015 they launched a cash back portal called Splender.
Since the entire Catera is now under the Ebates brand, the company is folding Splender entirely and encouraging members to use Ebates instead. No switch bonus is being offered. (Link)
Key dates:
- March 30, 2017 is the final day to make purchases through the Splender shopping portal
- June 20, 2017: make sure you have your Paypal account or payment info setup properly by this date so that you can get paid
- June 29, 2017: Splender officially shuts down
If you have $10+ in your Splender account, it’s your choice to be paid via check or via Paypal. If you have $9.99 or less you can only get paid via Paypal.
Overall it’s certainly a negative to have one less major shopping portal since we like to cherrypick the best portal rate, and having more options invariably means better rates. Personally, I’ve used Splender many times, though in most cases there were likely other portals with the same or close to the same rates. I’ve also racked up a number of referral credits from reader’s who used my signup link, thanks to all that did!
So any inflence toward MPX?
This is troubling. We need more competition in this space.
We really don’t though, considering that you need a minimum redemption amount that goes up to $20 for some portals. I’d rather earn slightly less money and be able to actually cash it out rather than earn $5 extra and have it be so fragmented across portals that I can only cash out half of it.
That’s not a great argument. You always had that choice before to stick with one portal. Now you have less choice.
What kind of argument is that? There is less competition so portals are suddenly going to allow you to cash out for smaller amounts now? If you’re willing to get a slightly lower rate then just do all your portal purchases through TCB because they’ll let you ACH money out in any amount. I cashed out $0.36 one time.
Paul you are right about the competition. Cartera Commerce controls some of the major portals including Splender, AA, UA, Southwest, Alaska, etc. And now, they are all ebates sub portals.
It would probably mean thinner competition in the mileage back regime as well.