Portal Cash back Caution

When you’re online shopping, there are shopping portals one can go through to save extra money. For a list of of portals with the current rates, I like to look at https://www.cashbackmonitor.com/

Occasionally, portals have deals where one can get more than a huge percentage back in rebate. Here’s an example I recently came across:

The idea behind this is that by using a portal, I can subscribe to a new VPN service and get the cost of the service and more back in rebate. I thought this would be a good way to make a few quick bucks. VPNs can cost up to hundreds of dollars (assuming you bill annually), so in theory I could make $50-$100 relatively easily. And I alwyas had the 30-day money-back guarantee.

This sounded too good to be true, and it was.

When a user goes through a portal to purchase the subscription, two things can happen. The purchase is either successfully tracked or not tracked at all. Then, if the purchase is tracked, to get the rebate, the retailer has to approve the purchase before the rebate is paid out to the customer. After all that, the rebate will pay out. This entire process can take up to months before the customer sees any cash back, which by then the customer will often have forgotten. Often times, some companies like the one above will take advantage of this fact to trick new customers into signing up and thinking they will receive cash back.

If the purchase fails to track, one can reach out to the portal’s customer service for assistance, but that also can take up to months before seeing any results. In the end, the potential hassle of these kind of deals is simply not worth it. That said, it’s not like this with all retailers; it’s only with the ones that sound too good to be true

The rule of thumb that I’ve learned over the past years is to never depend on portal rebates paying out. Treat shopping portals as an extra bonus that may or may not hit. If you set your expectations to that, then you’ll be ok.