(Update) Slide Offering More Than 4% Cashback On Brands From 8/29/22

Update 8/29/22: Slide announced a few days ago that it would be possible to earn up to 10% cashback on gift cards purchased in the app from today (August 29). Those changes have now come into effect and the results are…not amazing.

The worst part of this update is that while some gift card brands are indeed listed as up to 10% cashback, there are many brands that now earn less than 4% cashback, so Slide has become far less useful for those brands. A few highlights lowlights include eBay, Uber, Uber Eats, Dunkin’ Donuts, Grubhub and Chipotle which are all now only offering 1% cashback.

They’ve also made Dick’s Sporting Goods a “Slide Select” brand which means you don’t earn any cashback at all when buying that brand.

On the sort-of positive side, most brands now earn more than 4% cashback, with the majority of them earning 5%-8% cashback. The problem with that is that seeing as you can no longer earn cashback through a shopping portal, the total cashback you earn is still less than it was just a few weeks ago.

If Slide does return to shopping portals next year, it’ll become more interesting again for a lot of brands. In the meantime though, this update doesn’t do much to incentivize people to use the app to buy gift cards.

Slide has announced that they’ll be updating the app on Monday August 29, 2022 to make a fairly significant change.

Ever since the app launched a couple of years ago, they’ve offered a flat 4% cashback on all gift cards purchased in the app. There are a few exceptions that are known as Slide Select brands which includes Amazon, Home Depot, Macy’s, Newegg and a couple of others for which you earn no cashback.

In addition to the 4% cashback you can earn 1% bonus cashback when prefunding your account. It used to be possible to earn 2% when prefunding if you used a debit card, but that changed a couple of months back.

Slide recently stopped offering commission to affiliates which meant that it’s also no longer possible to earn additional cashback when clicking through from a shopping portal. In that post I said that they’d likely see a precipitous drop in revenue because without the shopping portal cashback, gift card resellers who make up the bulk of purchases in the app would give it a miss as a maximum of 5% cashback isn’t enough to make any of the brands break even or profitable for reselling.

The change that’s just been announced is that from August 29 Slide will offer different cashback rates depending on the brand. They’ve provided minimal details so far, but the examples they gave in the email are as follows:

• 10% cashback
  • Adidas
  • Carnival
• 8% cashback
  • Ray-Ban
  • Jiffy Lube
• 7% cashback
  • Domino’s
  • H&M
• 6% cashback
  • DSW
• 5% cashback
  • Gap
  • Athleta

There isn’t much of interest there other than perhaps Adidas at 10%. It’ll presumably be possible to earn 1% bonus cashback when prefunding your account, but that remains to be seen.

I don’t know if this change had been planned all along or if they’re concerned about the big drop in revenue recently and are trying to juice up sales. Unless they offer more generous cashback rates though, there still won’t be much reason to use the app from a reselling perspective or even from a personal use perspective seeing as you can often get discounts of 10%-20% on all of the brands listed above. The update to affiliates regarding commissions being cut off mentioned a new venture launching in 2023, so this update coming on August 29 is separate to that.

We also don’t know if all brands sold in the app will have their cashback rates increased or only certain brands. We’ll all have to wait until Monday to find out.