Last week I noticed that Ibotta had started offering bonus cashback when buying gift cards from Best Buy that were already on sale. That was awesome and my very first transaction with them tracked automatically before I’d even realized there was bonus cashback on offer, but since then my purchases haven’t tracked.
The first of my transactions that didn’t track was for a $25 The Children’s Place gift card and a $100 Bath & Body Works gift card. Ibotta was offering $2 and $5 bonus cashback respectively on top of Best Buy’s $2.50 and $10 respective discounts.
That meant I was missing $7 total cashback from Ibotta, so I opened the app and went to Account > Help > Submit A Request to make a claim. When doing this, the first dropdown box gives you a number of options under the heading ‘I Need Help With’. One of the options is ‘Purchased Gift Cards’ – don’t select that option. Ibotta sells gift cards in their app themselves and so I think that’s what that option relates to; if you pick that, it’ll likely confuse and/or complicate matters as your claim will probably go to the wrong department. Instead, I picked ‘Missing Credit’.
That takes you to a sub-dropdown list with several more options, the top two of which are ‘I Am Missing Offer Credit’ and ‘I Am Missing Bonus Credit’. Although you’re earning bonus cashback from Ibotta, the type of deal in the app is an offer rather than a bonus, so you need to select ‘I Am Missing Offer Credit’. The final sub-dropdown option to select is ‘Online Shopping Purchase’. The rest of the form is straightforward enough – I just wanted to highlight which options you need to select initially.
After making that claim a couple of days ago, I received a reply asking for a copy of my order confirmation email which had some specific instructions:
In order to best solve your issue, please send us a copy or PDF of your Best Buy email order confirmation with the following information clearly visible:
Order Number – If you do not have an order number please be sure to send us the email address or account ID associated with your purchase.
Order Items and Subtotal – Including a breakdown of any taxes, fees, or discounts.
Order Date and Timestamp – Please be sure to include a screenshot of the timestamp on your purchase confirmation email. You can find the timestamp above the body of the email by clicking on the date and the time will appear.
**If prompted to choose a picture attachment size, please select a Large size.**
I replied to that email with a PDF of my email receipt from Best Buy. I then received the following reply today:
Thank you for reaching out. We apologize for the inconvenience. We are currently looking into the cause of this issue, and have provided your account a total of $7.00 for the Bath & Body Works Gift Card and The Children’s Place Gift Card Bestbuy.com offers.
Although it’s a shame that these bonus cashback offers haven’t been tracking automatically for some transactions, it’s great that it wasn’t too much hassle making a claim and that Ibotta honored this first claim. Now it’s time to send in claims for the Airbnb deals.
Any gift card deal that is predicated on a cashback portal, you have to weigh the time that might be involved in submitting tickets and follow up. The last 3 months about 75% of the time TCB incorrectly tracks happy card purchases on GCM. I don’t think these companies are intentionally malicious in knowing there will be breakage, but the technnology is way less than 100%. Bottom line, do you have the time to keep track and battle for that $2 the portal fudged up?
Life is too short. Hard pass.
There are way too many deals out there and this is a hobby not a full time job for most. I need to be spending my time capital on the best most airtight deals.
If doing a deal was contingent on Ibotta cashback in the future (like the Bath & Body Works and The Children’s Place deals were), I probably won’t do it.
With deals like the 10% off Airbnb gift cards where I’d be buying them anyway, I’ll still click through from Ibotta as it’s not such a big deal if it doesn’t work out.
thanks good point
Decided to test the waters on a portal claim for the $10 back on the $200 AirBnB card that Best Buy offered. Thanks for the detail provided here, based on that I submitted the order screen shot with my initial missing cash back request. Their first response was give it 90 days. Their second response was that everything that should have tracked, did track (I also purchased two other Gift Cards that did track). Finally on the third response they agreed to credit my account. Not too sure it is worth the $10. For me, definitely would not be worth it for a smaller amount.
The topic about cash back claims failing to track is a good one. Do you have a post already about tips and how you track your cash back purchases to make sure you’ve received the reimbursement? Like do you have some method to keep track of all your purchases? For example, for me, as someone who always uses cash back portals and other deal sites to make online purchases, I only have a hand written ledger on paper and refer to it every so odd months to check to see if the money went through. Especially for the offers that aren’t immediate, i was curious what you to follow up on them.
To be honest, I’m not good about verifying that shopping portal transactions have tracked for the most part as I don’t track it carefully.
The exception to that is when I’ve bought gift cards from Slide after clicking through from TopCashback or Dollar Dig. On my gift card tracking spreadsheet I make a note of the order number after every Slide purchase, then a week later I make sure the transactions have tracked on the shopping portal(s).