iConsumer Is Once Again Changing How You Earn With Them

At the start of 2022 I predicted that the iConsumer shopping portal would offer something in addition to – or instead of – stock. The reason I made that prediction is because iConsumer had consistently flip-flopped over the years on how you earned with them from stock to cashback to stock to crypto to a mix of stock and cashback, etc.

I was apparently suffering from premature anticipation because my prediction was correct, it was just a few months early. That’s because iConsumer sent out an email today advising that they’ll be moving to an all-cashback model from March 10.

Here’s what the email says:

It’s time to move to iConsumer’s next phase: a focus on revenue and earnings per share, rather than on new member growth. Since our launch, we’ve issued lots of stock to attract and retain members. That unending issuance has a negative impact on our earnings per share, and thus on our stock price.

Your shopping is our revenue. If you shop Amazon, dealburner is open for business.  Great curated deals updated daily, and it’s a profit center for iConsumer. Bookmark it today.

Second, because we issued stock every time you shopped an iConsumer partner store, the more you shopped, the worse our earnings. That had to stop some time, and that time is now.

Beginning March 10, 2023, iConsumer will no longer use its stock to attract and reward members’ shopping. The reward we’ll offer is great cashback. Stock earned or promised for actions (e.g. purchases, member recruitment) that occurred before March 10, 2023 isn’t affected. No more unending stock dilution. No more negative earnings from unending stock issuances. Hopefully a story Wall Street understands better.

We go into the thinking and timing in this Shareholder Academy post. To summarize, we’re going to focus on getting each of our existing members to use iConsumer more, without increasing the number of shares of stock. We’ll continue to use non stock related methods to increase membership and reward your shopping.

Moving to an all-cashback model is apparently the latest batch of spaghetti they’ve decided to throw against the wall. It’s mildly amusing because they’ve spent the last couple of years sharing how amazing it is to earn stock with them. Now their stance is “Well, y’know, earning stock with us wasn’t great because the value of your stock kept going down every time you earned it.”

This is – hopefully – going to be an improvement and it’ll certainly make things less confusing for users as it’ll be easier to compare rates against other shopping portals. For example, they advertise Giftcards.com as earning a 3.4% rebate which sounds amazing seeing as most portals only offer 1% for non-Happy gift card purchases. However, that’s because iConsumer is only offering 0.9% cashback and 2.5% back in stock. For Staples they list a 13.6% rebate, but that’s only 3.6% cashback and 10% stock.

Something I just noticed is that at some point recently Cashback Monitor appears to have dropped iConsumer from the list of shopping portals it tracks. iConsumer used to often top the cashback list due to the misleading way in which they list the total rebate rather than the cashback rate, so Cashback Monitor presumably decided to leave them off the site as a result (that’s just my speculation). I’m curious if that’s part of – or the main – reason why iConsumer decided to reverse course and only offer cashback going forward.