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One of the greatest double dip opportunities lately has been to purchase Sears e-Gift cards through a portal to earn rewards and then earn additional rewards when you use those gift cards. I have covered this strategy before.
This morning Julian of The Devil’s Advocate and Bet You Didn’t Know fame, emailed me to let me know that several portals have changed their language to exclude gift cards from earning portal rewards. I checked several portals and confirmed the changes.
Here is the new language on several portals:
Southwest, Delta, AAdvantage, United (All Cartera): Not eligible on online purchase made using Sears Shop Your Way points. Not eligible on gift cards, gift certificates or any other similar cash equivalents.
BeFrugal: No cash back on apparel clearance, delivery charges, installation, layaway, master protection agreements, gift cards, and auto & home services.
Ebates and Discover don’t contain any language excluding gift cards and Top Cashback has the following interesting language:
Please note: Cash Back is eligible on the sale of Giftcards. There will be no cash back awarded for the redemption of gift cards.
Bottom Line
Sears generally handles all portals the same way, so the ones without the gift card exclusion are probably just slow to update. It seems this deal is probably done for now, but if you do decide to purchase through a portal without the exclusion, make sure to document everything.
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[…] Warning: Portals No Longer Paying for the Purchase of Sears Gift Cards […]
Bought ~$800 in Sears GC on my Discover IT on Aug 28th through the Discover Deals portal; I received a cashback confirmation email yesterday.
Bought $450 in Sears GC on my BofA Travel Rewards (BankAmerideal) on Aug 29th through Topcashback, and Topcashback is showing $9 in pending cash back.
I bought $1000 in Sears gc through Southwest’s portal. It’s showing that I earned 6000 points on the portal page, but hasn’t posted on my Rapid Rewards account. I’m assuming they will?
Hit up united 9x almost a week ago on a double dip just waiting for everything to post, I got a screen shot showing the terms on that date, Thank God.
Discover Deals still not updated. Considering whether I should try to get in under the wire. Seems like Discover has language here to cover a delay in updating their terms:
“These are subject to change, including termination without notice.”
So I bought $1485 worth of reloads last week at Sears through the Discover portal and got the congratulations email 2 days later for the 10% cash back. Is this still doable? I actually did this on my wife’s card and I just got my own Discover card in the mail this week so I was hoping to do this again today with my card. I’ve found a couple CSR’s at local Sears that let me buy $200 VGC with the Sears GC in store so profit margin on $1485 of reloads was really high. Think I should give it a go to do exact same thing through Discover portal again?
Straight MS like that isn’t as lucrative than ??? (not spoon-feeding).
If you’re referring to merchandise reselling I’m way too lazy to do that for not that much more incremental return
[…] Warning: Portals No Longer Paying for the Purchase of Sears Gift Cards by Frequent Miler. This deal was too good to last with the Discover Double cash back promotion, but still disappointing to see it gone. […]
Wow hopefully I got in just in time before the change! About two weeks ago I bought $1200 in Sears GCs through the Discover Deals portal and went back through the portal and redeemed the GCs. Got both Congratulations emails for portal cash back but now am worried about a course correcting claw back… when would that happen if so? I’d hate to lose any of the 50% cash back which made my new hybrid water heater a STEAL!
[…] via Quick Deals, we reported that Sears is no longer allowing portal rewards to be earned when buying gift cards. Previously, many portals had the following Terms & Conditions for […]
So back in the day, I used to get Congratulations emails all the time (when it was shopdiscover.com and not Discover Deals).
In the last week, I’ve made several Discover Deals purchases with my new Discover IT card and have failed to receive any emails whatsoever.
Am I screwed? Should I be getting these emails?
Interesting development
FM,
I signed up for this thread today using the “subscribe without commenting” method and they’re still coming in plain text.
Chimmy
Discover still doesn’t say that GCs are excluded.
It looks like the above language also seems to eliminate earning rewards if you use SYWR points on purchases. Is that also new? I have been earning points through portals on total purchase price even when I use points to cover almost the price. That worked as late as yesterday getting confirmation. Am I in for a world of hurt on my little purchases?
Something had to give. How could Sears have possibly sustained giving 10-20% off everything by letting you double dip?