There have been a couple of recent developments regarding the Slide app that are worth being aware of in case that affects how and when you buy gift cards in the app.
Warning 1 – New User Bonus
At some point in the last week or so, TopCashback added the following wording to their Slide listing:
Cash back is not elgible (sic) on refunding (sic) the Slide Balance and unfortunately the transaction of funding the account does count as a first transaction, therefore making the user an “existing user”.
There seems to be a couple of typos in that wording. ‘Elgible’ is meant to say ‘eligible’, while it seems that ‘refunding’ should actually say ‘prefunding’.
It’s that latter wording that’s key to this first issue. TopCashback offers two different cashback rates when buying gift cards in the Slide app. There’s a higher rate for new users and a lower rate for existing users – that’s on top of the 4-6% cashback you’ll earn from Slide itself.
In the past a new user could click through from TopCashback, prefund their account to earn 1-2% cashback, then buy their first gift card to earn the ‘New User’ cashback rate on that purchase. One popular method was to preload your account with $2,000 and buy a $2,000 Lowe’s gift card seeing as Slide sells that high denomination. You’d earn 1-2% cashback when prefunding and whatever the New User cashback rate was – sometimes as high as 30-32%. That meant you could potential earn 34% cashback on that first purchase which is amazing on a $2,000 Lowe’s gift card (provided you could find someone to sell that to).
It’s likely that type of transaction which has brought in this change. TopCashback’s wording – which presumably comes from Slide and so likely affects other shopping portals too – states that prefunding your account makes you an existing user. The problem is that shopping portal cashback is only earned when making a purchase – not when prefunding your account. That means if you prefund your account as a new user, you’re going to be forgoing the increased cashback rate for your first purchase and so will only earn the reduced ‘Existing User’ rate.
If you’ve never bought from Slide before and are considering using it, the best option would be to not prefund your account for your very first transaction. While that means you’ll be missing out on the 1-2% bonus cashback Slide offers for prefunding, at least it means you’ll earn the higher New User cashback rate on your first purchase.
Warning 2 – Can’t Sell Cards Bought From Slide On Raise
In case you weren’t aware, Slide is owned by Raise – the popular gift card marketplace. Raise has now communicated to some (or perhaps all) of its resellers that they’ll no longer accept gift cards purchased in the Slide app for resale on the Raise platform.
As a result, many gift card buying groups/private buyers are no longer allowing you to resell to them gift cards purchased from Slide because the end destination would’ve been Raise. If you’re planning on buying any gift cards from Slide in the future (or have an existing stash of cards from Slide you’ve not resold yet), be sure to check with the people you’re planning on selling the cards to as to whether or not they can accept them.
In some cases it won’t be an issue because they’ll have a private buyer lined up and so the cards wouldn’t end up being listed on Raise, but it’d suck to buy a bunch of cards on Slide only to find out your reselling options are extremely limited or non-existent.
My initial though was, this is great news! Pre-loading counts….. oh… it makes you an existing user but doesn’t count as a transaction. That’s BS. Otherwise you could load as much as slide or your credit card would let you and wouldn’t be limited to the $2k Lowe’s gift card or whatever the biggest denomination is available.
I recently got an email from Raise’s compliance department, asking me to upload my ID and answer some KYC questions due to having bought a large amount of gift cards from Slide in the past. The email went to my spam but customer support said it was a legitimate email.