In case you’re not too familiar with the Ibotta app, it’s an app that offers cashback when buying certain items at the grocery store. They also sell gift cards in the app, offering cashback on the purchase rather than giving an up-front discount. Most months they boost the cashback rates on a bunch of gift card brands which can make them a good deal for personal use and, occasionally, for reselling. A downside with Ibotta is that they only accept debit card payment, but you can pay with the PayPal Business Debit Mastercard for 1% cashback.
In addition to the regular shopping offers, Ibotta sometimes targets users with additional bonuses based on redeeming x number of offers. For example, a few days ago a bonus offer showed up on my account giving $10 bonus cashback when redeeming 22 offers, then another one showed up yesterday giving $3 bonus cashback when redeeming 10 offers (you can see what that looks like in the screenshot above).
I tend to ignore these bonus offers when going grocery shopping as I rarely redeem enough offers to hit the required thresholds. I got lucky with this latest round of bonus offers though because they coincided with some good gift card deals in the app. When you buy a gift card in the Ibotta app and earn cashback, it counts as you redeeming an offer. Even better, buying more than one gift card for the same brand counts as you redeeming an offer for every purchase you make.
As a result of the gift card purchases I’d been making this week, I’d redeemed 20 of the 22 offers I needed for the $10 bonus cashback and 5 of the 10 offers I needed for the $3 bonus cashback. The people I’d been selling the gift cards to stopped buying the brands I’d been getting from Ibotta, so I was just short for both of the bonuses.
It was easy earning the $13 total bonus cashback though. Ibotta is offering 20% cashback on IHOP gift cards right now and the minimum denomination is $5. I therefore bought five $5 IHOP gift cards for $25, earning $5 cashback in the process as a result of that 20% rate. Paying with the PayPal Business Debit Mastercard meant I earned an additional $0.25 for a net cost of $19.75. I resold those cards for $19.50, so I lost $0.25 on that basis.
Except I didn’t really lose $0.25. By making those five transactions, I completed the offer redemption requirements on both of those bonus offers, thereby earning $13 bonus cashback for a profit of $12.75. Ibotta lets you buy gift cards quickly one after another, so this whole process took less than five minutes which made the effort for $12.75 more worthwhile.
Anyway, I figured it was worth highlighting this feature in the Ibotta app in case you ever find yourself in need of a way to complete a few offer redemptions to earn bonus cashback without having to go to the grocery store and buying qualifying items.