A new (to me) shopping portal showed up in the search results on Cashback Monitor the other day called ShopStyle. I’d been looking for the best rates for J. Crew Factory to take advantage of the J. Crew Factory Chase Offer and saw ShopStyle listed at the top of the cashback portals with a 10% rate.
That got me wondering though – is ShopStyle legit? I’d not heard of it before and there are so many different shopping portals out there that I’m always wary when a new one appears. I therefore decided to do a little research and it looks like yes – ShopStyle is legit.
It turns out that ShopStyle isn’t new – in fact, it was launched in 2007. It seems like its primary focus is as an affiliate program for fashion influencers, allowing them to create affiliate links to products they recommend in order to earn cashback. In addition to that is its function as a standard cashback shopping portal, albeit one that seemingly only lists fashion websites rather than a full range of sites like Home Depot, Walmart, etc.
Ultimately though, the reason I came to the conclusion that it’s legit is because it’s now owned by Rakuten. Rakuten is a well-established company that bought Ebates (now known as Rakuten itself) in 2014. ShopStyle appears to be mostly separate from the Rakuten portal though. I just signed up for ShopStyle and used the same email address I use for Rakuten. It showed my historical Rakuten earnings, but allowed me to choose a different password for ShopStyle than the one I use for Rakuten. It doesn’t provide the option to earn rewards in the form of Membership Rewards rather than cashback, so I’m assuming you just earn cashback with ShopStyle. The FAQs aren’t clear about how that works though.
Anyway, I just wanted to publish this quick post in case you see it listed on Cashback Monitor and wonder whether it’s safe to use. It looks like the minimum payout is $5, so it shouldn’t be hard to meet that threshold for the quarterly payment schedules.