TopCashback has joined other shopping portals Rakuten and RebatesMe by featuring a gift card portal that offers cashback when buying them.
You can find the new TopCashback gift card site here. They’re selling first hand gift cards and payment is processed by WeGift. Fixed denominations are available, but you can also buy customized amounts to the penny (e.g. $57.23). Being able to buy any value can be useful if you know how much your order will be as it means you don’t have to buy a higher value gift card and have some kind of residual value left on it.
Initial Thoughts
At first glance the cashback rates on offer seem to be OK, but not spectacular. Most brands seem to be in the 6%-8% cashback range which means that you’d actually be better off by clicking through from TopCashback to the Slide app and buying gift cards from there. That’s because if you earn 1% cashback when preloading Slide with a credit card or 2% with a debit card. You then earn 4% cashback from Slide on the purchase and 4% cashback from TopCashback. That means you earn 9%-10% cashback depending on what kind of card you use to preload your account.
There are only 10 gift card brands that TopCashback is offering 10%+ cashback for, so their gift card portal is worth being aware of, but in most cases you’ll do better buying gift cards from elsewhere. Having said that, you can indirectly boost the cashback you earn when buying gift cards from TopCashback. That’s because when you redeem cashback earned from TopCashback, they have various different redemption options that provide additional cashback (e.g. 2% bonus for an Amazon gift card, 5% bonus for a virtual Visa gift card, etc.) If you purchase a gift card that offers 6% cashback and then redeem that cashback for a 5% bonus on a virtual Visa gift car, you’re effectively boosting that initial cashback rate to 6.3%.
Once per month or so TopCashback offers $2.50 bonus cashback when spending $10. Provided these gift card purchases aren’t excluded as an eligible transaction, that could be another way to boost how much cashback you earn when buying gift cards from them.
Hopefully this is just the opening salvo from TopCashback though. When Rakuten launched their gift card portal the rates were fairly low. Every so often since then they’ve boosted rates on various brands which has made their offering a little more interesting, especially seeing as you can earn the “cashback” as Membership Rewards with Rakuten. As a result, we’ll hopefully see TopCashback increase rates on at least some brands in the future, but it remains to be seen as to whether that’ll come to pass.
Buying Gift Cards From TopCashback
I was curious about what the buying process would be like, how quickly the gift cards would arrive and if my order would even be processed in the first place. I was particularly curious about that latter point because when the Slide app was first launched, my first purchase was declined. A similar thing happened when Rakuten launched their own gift card portal last year – I tried placing a few orders and every single one got declined.
The process of buying gift cards from TopCashback is fairly straightforward. Once you’ve selected the brand and denomination, you select if you want the card sent to yourself or someone else. You then enter your email address, phone number and billing address.
On the next page you enter your card details and complete your order.
How Fast Are Gift Cards Sent By TopCashback?
After placing the order, the order confirmation screen stated the following:
Thanks for your order Stephen, you will receive an order confirmation email shortly.
Your Google Play e-gift card may take up to 1 business day to process. This will be sent in a separate email. If you don’t spot the email, please check your spam or junk folders.
The gift card arrived faster than one business day though. In fact, it arrived instantly. After placing the order, I went to my emails and there were two emails from TopCashback already there – one was the order confirmation and the other was a link to view the gift card. There’s obviously no guarantee that gift cards will always arrive immediately, but it’s nice to see that some orders at least are fulfilled instantly, plus my order wasn’t auto-cancelled which is obviously a plus too!
One Minor Downside – Always Completing Your Information
After buying the gift card, I went back to TopCashback’s gift card site to see if it had saved any of my information. It hadn’t. That’s inconvenient if you’ll be buying gift cards from them frequently as it means you’ll have to complete your details every time. Then again, you can use autofill for most of the details and so it’s not that much of an issue.
When Do You Receive Gift Card Cashback From TopCashback?
10 minutes after buying a gift card I received another email from TopCashback advising that the purchase had tracked. It initially showed as pending on my Earnings screen, then became payable two days later.
How Do Gift Cards From TopCashback Code?
The purchase showed up on the statement as ‘WEGIFT USA INC.’ The category was ‘Shopping’ and the merchant type was ‘Miscellaneous and specialty retail stores’, so it seems like the best card to pay with will be whichever card you use for non-bonused transactions unless you have a card (e.g. the Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards card) that offers bonused spend on online purchases.
Site is down? Looks like you have to go through this link for it to work: https://www.topcashback.com/top-gift-cards
That’s weird that they’d set it up that way – I’ll update the post.