Update 7/12/23: It turns out that Drop lied. In the original email they sent giving the reason for why rewards were delayed in being issued, they claimed it was because they were “working on improving and expanding our gift card reward options.” Not too surprisingly, it turns out that wasn’t the case.
Derrick Fung, the CEO of Drop, sent out the following email today:
I’d like to start off by apologizing for the lack of communication coming from Drop on any delayed gift card deliveries. It was very important to myself and the Drop team that we had a solid plan in place before we communicated what led to the delays and what we are going to do moving forward.
This past April, Drop’s financial position was directly affected by a banking collapse that made news globally. As a result, we were forced to delay gift card delivery to ensure we can continue to fulfill our promise to reward members in the long term.
I am pleased to report that the issues stemming from this incident have now been resolved. The satisfaction of our members is and continues to be the top priority for myself, our employees and board of directors.
Beginning July 17, all outstanding redeemed points will be refunded back to your account, and an additional bonus of 5,000 points will be added as our way of thanking you for your understanding and patience. Our redemption functionality will return to normal and all gift cards will be delivered instantly. New redemption limits will be introduced to ensure that we do not experience this type of outage again in the future.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a loyal Drop member. We know that we have lost some of your trust and will do everything we can to regain it. We greatly appreciate your patience during these times – Drop wouldn’t be here without your continued support.
I’m assuming that this related to the SVB issues a few months back or one of the other handful of banks that encountered problems around that same time. The thing I don’t get is why they couldn’t have been more honest about the issue at the time. It quickly became apparent that companies with funds at SVB were being protected. Drop could therefore have simply said that their account was with SVB and that while they were in the process of moving to a different bank (or while things were being stabilized at SVB if they planned to stay there), they’d have to delay rewards being issued. That would’ve given me far more confidence in their financial position rather than that users had to wait 1.5 months (soon to become 2 months) in order to obtain their rewards due to improvements being made to redemption options as that made things seem much worse than they actually were.
Anyway, hopefully things will be fine going forward.
An anonymous reader reached out recently to give a heads up that the Drop app has made a severe change to redemptions in the app. Drop offers a few methods for redeeming the points you earn, with the best being the ability to redeem them for a variety of third party gift cards.
In the past gift card redemptions took a matter of minutes, but they’ve now instituted a new policy of having it take up to 45 days. As you can imagine, this is being dressed up as a positive thing for us users because it’s being done due to them “making changes to better serve our members.”
In their FAQs it goes on to say:
We are working on improving and expanding our gift card reward options. In order to successfully make these improvements, a temporary delay in gift card delivery times is required.
While we know that other reward programs can take 60 days or longer to reward members, we have always taken pride in delivering rewards faster than anyone else and are committed to making these interruptions as brief as possible.
Perhaps we should take them at face value, but I also can’t help being pessimistic that this could be indicating financial problems at Drop. If they were to be running out of cash, delaying payouts by 1.5 months could make sense while they try to get more cash in the door. If that was indeed the case, it would in effect be becoming a rewards Ponzi scheme whereby newly earned rewards are used to pay out rewards earned from 1.5+ months ago.
That said, maybe this really is just the result of slow-ass deployment of a new redemption system that’ll give additional gift card brands. The fact that they’d recently added new gift card redemption options and were already capable of processing gift card redemptions quickly makes me dubious.
If you’re sitting on any Drop points, I’d redeem them now in the hopes that you get the gift cards at some point in the next 45 days in case they end up going under at some point after that.
I have about $130 balance. Never redeemed any before. When I tried to redeem for the first time a week ago got a message to contact support.
Here is the response.
Your account has been reviewed and our team has determined the activity on your account has violated our terms of service. Your email(s), credit cards, and user information have been flagged in our system. Your account will remain on hold.
Were the majority of your points earned through gift card purchases at the retailers?
Same thing happened with me
Same thing with me. No real responses other than to say my account is on hold. I still don’t know if that means its dead, or on hold while its being reviewed etc. No gift card purchases at all (mostly Dell and Amazon…)
A few months ago they had surveys that were asking members about banking points for x time to receive interest on their points.
It’s a cash crunch
Warning: Since this post, it’s gotten worse: “currently, gift cards are being delivered approximately 60 days from the time of redemption.”
I have no idea what changes could be made that make waiting 2 months to receive. a gift card worth it. Im sure everyone would prefer receiving gift cards immediately and only have 5 options to choose between over expanding our options.
It’s May 7th, I just redeemed and now 60 days till I get my gift card (7/6 quoted). Wouldn’t be shocked if I never did and they go under. Their process took minutes to get gift cards but “member feedback” caused them to change it all. I didn’t give any feedback lol. Makes no logical sense for it to take 60 days to get a gift card. My guess is they are going under or struggling for cash. 60 days to get a digital gift card is criminal.
I am on day 58 of waiting for an American Eagle gift card, and day 5 of waiting for a DoorDash gift card. I will be shocked if they ever come.
I’m on days 65 & 68 waiting for 2 Amazon gift cards. Wouldn’t be surprised if I never get the gift cards.
This is the email I received from Drop support-
Thanks for reaching out to us.
We’re currently experiencing a delay in sending out gift cards that were redeemed on or after April 3rd.
If you had redeemed a gift card during this time, your gift card is currently in a pending state and will be sent out once we have resolved this roadblock.
We sincerely apologize as we know this is quite frustrating that the 60-day timeline has not been met. We are working on this as best we can and will have your gift cards sent out as soon as possible.
We’ll be placing your ticket on hold and we’ll reach back out here as soon as the gift cards have been sent.
We appreciate your patience!
I uninstalled the app after every single time it loaded it had to “update,” a process taking anywhere from 20 seconds to several minutes.
Nice of them to give 5000 points, though. That’s what, $3? Kind of like spitting on someone and then giving them a used kleenex to wipe it off.
Drop has made it impossible to redeem points. It has become a scam. I am not sure if this type of thing is regulated, but they have begun saying gift cards are sold out – every Thursday at 12N you can redeem for a very few cards (not enough in balance to what people have earned). For several weeks now I get on at 12N and get nothing but errors. It’s clearly a ploy to NOT pay out. SCAM!