Update 8/18/22: Slide’s affiliate program is now showing 0% commission, so it looks like cashback via shopping portals has now officially ended. There might still be some portals that neglect to update their site and still show cashback being offered, but I suspect that’ll be inaccurate and so I wouldn’t count on actually receiving payouts from them. Having said that, if one or more portals still show cashback being offered and you were going to buy gift cards from Slide regardless, you might as well click through from a portal on the off-chance that it works; just don’t take that extra cashback into consideration before buying if it would make a difference to where you buy the cards from.
Update 8/17/22: Just a quick reminder that today might be the last day to earn cashback via shopping portals when buying gift cards in the Slide app. The email sent to affiliates isn’t entirely clear as to whether cashback ends on August 18 in terms of it ending at the end of the day on the 18th, or if it effectively ends overnight tonight. If you have any balance sitting on your Slide account, it’d therefore be safest to buy gift cards today in order to earn ~4% cashback from portals too.
I feared this was coming but hoped it wouldn’t come to pass. Sadly, Slide will soon stop paying cashback via shopping portals after clicking through from one before buying gift cards in the app.
Slide has today advised that they’re pausing their affiliate program from August 18, 2022. As a result, shopping portals will be unable to offer cashback to customers from that date.
I was concerned recently that there was the potential for this happening seeing as Raise announced that they’d be pausing their affiliate program and Slide is owned by Raise, but I was hopeful that with it being a different entity and that Slide wasn’t included in that announcement that Slide’s affiliate program would be spared. Sadly not.
You’ll still be able to earn up to 5% cashback when buying gift cards from Slide – 4% as standard on the actual purchase and 1% when preloading your account. It’s the ~4% cashback via a shopping portal that’ll be nixed.
That’s a huge hit. 5% cashback isn’t very appealing at all, whereas 9% was more interesting from a reselling perspective. Some gift card brands sold in the app were profitable or breakeven at a 91% resale rate or thereabouts, so depending on your reselling relationships it was sometimes possible to generate a lot of spend via Slide. I doubt there’ll be any gift card buyers interested in Slide cards at 95%, so those opportunities will be closed off.
It feels like this is short-sighted on Slide’s part because they’ll no doubt see a precipitous drop in revenue as I imagine the bulk of purchases in the app were made by resellers who were earning 9% cashback. The only reason I can imagine this would make sense on Slide’s part is if they were selling some of these cards at a loss, so pausing their affiliate program will stem those losses.
The potentially good thing is that Slide is only saying that they’re pausing their affiliate program, so hopefully it’ll return next year. However, for at least the rest of 2022, Slide will become an ignored app for many.
In case you’re interested, here’s the email Slide sent to affiliates:
On behalf of the Slide App team, we would like to thank you all for being active partners in the program.
We wanted to give you notice that we will temporarily pausing our affiliate program beginning August 18, 2022. We are pausing our program in order to reserve our marketing spend to invest in a new venture that will launch in 2023.
As a result, we need to shut off all contracts in Impact. Unfortunately that means we will not be paying out commissions to foreseeable future. However, we will be back and we will notify all of our partners so we can pick up where we left off.
Please remove all active Slide links on your site as well as any messaging or promotions that may lead your members to think that they will receive cash back at Slide through your platform. We will be moving all affiliate partners to 0% CPA.
Again, thank you for being a part of our program and we look forward to continuing our partnership in the future.
They’re of course under no obligation to give a coherent explanation, but that email strikes me as not making much sense?
If they look at this as a commission, presumably either it generates incremental profitable business, in which case it seems strange to suspend it, or it doesn’t, in which case why would they explicitly promise that the program will be back?
Maybe they look at this as some sort of cost of customer acquisition (which really only makes sense though when there are lifetime limits), but even that invites the same sort of questions, plus you have to wonder why they’re willing to pause that effort. One would think their “marketing” budget is not a charity for their affiliates, either it generates profit for them or not. Maybe this new venture is so promising that they’d rather be incentivizing new customers for that product. Not necessarily a great sign for Slide/Raise, though.
Kind of makes you wonder if something is up. Or maybe not — the way businesses allocate expenses invites all sorts of strange behaviors. Worth watching!
Damn…good to know
double bad merchant
So, we still get 5% plus whatever CC cashback/points after the 18. I’m buying discounted G/C to spend in my reselling business as opposed to trying to resell G/C. The discount has been shrinking but still better than I can get anyplace else! As with Honey/PP, I can get the exact amount I need for a purchase as well as cashback for my purchase. Stacks nicely and I don’t have to run to the store to hopefully find the card I need.
I highly doubt this is disappearing forever, but rather being retooled.
Word in the street is that the 1% of Slide users were consuming 98.9% of their affiliate commissions.