Update 11/23/21: Slide has reached out to confirm that they don’t pass any information to eBay, so that’s good news. Here’s their response:
Slide does not share any gift card or customer information with eBay, so it is impossible for the cards to have been automatically loaded. The user may have attempted to use the “Shop Online” functionality in the Slide app that points members to eBay’s website (within the Slide app) during a purchase, and possibly applied the gift cards to his account by accident.
Reader EW reached out to share his concerning experience after buying eBay gift cards in the Slide app recently and he doesn’t seem to be the only person having issues after using their app to buy eBay gift cards.
As a bit of background, the Slide app can – in theory – be a great place to buy eBay gift cards. That’s because eBay gift cards rarely go on sale, so being able to earn up to 6% cashback from Slide along with cashback from a shopping portal can be about as good as it gets unless you can get good value from grocery store loyalty programs.
Anyway, EW bought a few eBay gift cards and two of them were subsequently loaded to his eBay account without him being the one to do that. He didn’t even balance check the cards and accidentally load the value that way. These were bought for someone else and so it was a lot of hassle getting eBay to move the credits over to that person because once loaded to an account, they can’t be loaded to another account.
Both the email address and phone number for EW were the same on his Slide and eBay accounts which is presumably how they were able to connect the accounts and auto-load the gift card values. What’s also strange is that they only did this for two of the handful of eBay gift cards he bought. This suggests that Slide is passing email addresses and/or phone numbers of its users to eBay when they buy eBay gift cards. If that is indeed the case, it’s very concerning. To be fair, they may well have terms in their user agreement stating that they’re allowed to do this which we all accepted when signing up, but if that’s the case it’s not a great policy for them to have.
This isn’t an isolated incident either as I’ve seen reports of other Slide users having issues relating to eBay gift cards too. Their problems were different, but they had a very hard time proving to eBay that they were the ones who’d bought the gift cards despite giving clear evidence that they’d purchased them. I think they eventually got the cards unlocked, but these are further instances of eBay gift cards from Slide being the common denominator.
I’d therefore be very cautious about buying eBay gift cards from Slide, whether that’s for personal use or buying them as a gift. I’m not aware of any kind of issues with other gift card brands right now – it seems to only relate to eBay and ultimately it’s eBay themselves who are subsequently causing the problems.
There are so many holes in this story. How did the gift cards magically end up loaded to his account in the first place without him knowing? You can’t “balance check and accidentally load” unless you enter the codes at checkout and then subsequently check out with that code.
This just sounds like someone who doesn’t know how eBay gift cards work, specifically that they are locked to the account.
He specifically stated in his original email that he never logged into his eBay account after he bought from Slide nor checked the balance of the cards on eBay’s website. I’m assuming he discovered there was an issue with the cards after the person he sent them to was unable to use them, or perhaps when seeing there was a balance on his own eBay account when going to make a purchase.