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UPDATE 2/21/2016: Portal Rewards are Back
Recently, GiftCards.com became the place to buy Visa gift cards. With Simply Best Coupons offering 1.5% cash back and iCoupons offering 1.6% cash back, one could get back all of the purchase fee and most of the shipping fee when buying $500 Visa gift cards.
Now, though, if you look for GiftCards.com on Simply Best Coupons, you’ll see that they aren’t offering any cash back:
I found the same thing on every other portal that usually carries giftcards.com. iConsumer has a different message, but the same result – no cash back:
iConsumer’s message suggests that the lack of cash back is a temporary. I reached out to iConsumer to see what was going on. The reply:
They have taken us down while they investigate the amazing increase in volume that came via iConsumer.
That may be what they told iConsumer, but I’d bet that they got a flood of orders from both iConsumer and Simply Best Coupons. And, it looks like they’ve pulled out of all portals while they try to figure out what to do. I’m hoping that they’ll return to portals soon. Unfortunately, it’s a good bet that they’ll lower the payout for Visa gift cards, or lower the top value allowed for purchase (to $250, for example). Either way, it probably won’t mean nearly fee free gift cards in the future.
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[…] add insult to injury, Giftcards.com was pulled from most portals a couple months ago, but now it’s slowly making it’s way […]
[…] few weeks ago I reported that GiftCards.com had disappeared from portals (see: “What happened to GiftCards.com?”). Now, they’re back. Interestingly, while they used to offer lower cash back […]
[…] from GiftCards.com. This made these PIN-enabled cards nearly fee-free. Soon after my posts, GiftCards.com withdrew from all portals. Did I kill the deal? Probably. Would the deal have died without me? Probably, but maybe it […]
Legitimate question here. I can see how some people in the MS community are upset at FM for blogging about lucrative opportunities and then seeing them shutdown; however, what doesn’t make any sense to me is the question of why a place such as giftcards.com would actually cease to allow purchases…please follow my logic and respond if you have any insight.
Giftcards.com is a business and as such would not sell giftcards at a loss. So when they chose to shutdown the GMoney Rewards program (which essentially made gift cards free) or stopped allowing points accrual through portals such as iConsumer, I don’t see why? The sale of gift cards is not illegal so that’s not the answer. They wouldn’t agree to any sort of deal that would lose them money so even at whatever commission they agreed on with iConsumer or reward deal through GMoney Rewards, they would still make a small profit…so that doesn’t seem to be the answer either. That’s all I the options I can think of. A business is in business to make money and wouldn’t make a deal that would lose money so the fact they made a legal deal with iConsumer (which obviously would make them money), I fail to see why Giftcards.com would cutback on the deal….please if anyone can give some insight I am extremely curious.
I highly doubt they made any profit via G-rewards or the portal cashback. One reason is, sometimes businesses take some losses of profit to increase revenue. There is usually a point where the losses add to more than what they would deem worthy of that increased revenue and shut it down. I am sure there are other reasons as well.
Safeway also took all of their 500 dollar Visa, MC, AMEX cards off of their racks this weekend. I had been buying them with the old AMEX BLUE CASH for 5pc off in large quantities.
It’s gotten very tough out there.
Another avenue closed but it’s not that big of a deal. This is why I keep the better deals close to my chest. I’m sure FM does too. Some deals are way too good to share.
No surprise there. I mentioned in a comment last month that this will die before the end of February
You must find yourself in quite a pickle…you need to have plenty of content that will bring in the readers, but by posting the content you are killing the deal, thus pissing off your readers.
Maybe it’s time to stop blogging for a living.
+1. You helped kill that deal.
No way this comes back. This was humming along nicely for a while. Like everything else in this game, too much attention killed it.
Also possible that they are tightening things up. They just went through the acquisition by Blackhawk Networks. As someone who has been through two acquisitions, I can say that the pace of change (and many time change back!) can give you whiplash.
https://blackhawknetwork.com/blackhawk-network-acquires-giftcards-com-and-omnicard-com/
I worry that this will somehow end up with the same bad experience that I had when Blackhawk bought IncentiveLabs.com and merged this with GiftCardMall.com and all of a sudden you never new if you were going to get the “non-PIN” sunnies from IncentiveLab or the nice MetaBank cards from GCM.
On the plus side, regarding portals, GiftCardMall had commissions paid on visa gift cards for quite a while before this, so hopefully it is not gone, but I would not be surprised to see if back to the .5% that it was for GCM.
I did not use giftcards.com, but I have a feeling that this community is going to become much more “closed” than it already is. Maybe it’s just the timing, but to me it looks like the available opportunities are dying much faster than they used to in the past.
Don’t act surprised about it…you should have known blowing the lid off of the deal was going to close it.
Writing was on the wall as soon as you started blogging about it… was 100% going to happen.
Greg, your point was made. You can end any good thing by blogging about it. Next time, just name your price and we’ll pay the ransom. Contact Mike or I and we’ll see what we can do.