One of the most frustrating parts of using shopping portals for manufactured spending is waiting for the payout. I love the Alaska shopping portal because points usually post within 3 weeks. I wish that were the case for cash back portals. Back in April, I wrote about how you could purchase $200 Visa gift cards from Staples and earn 6 Swagbucks per $1 spent. These points could be converted to Paypal cash at a rate of 1 cent per point. I ordered $3,800 worth of gift cards and received confirmation from Swagbucks that my transaction had been tracked. The email also said I should receive 23,592 Â Swagbucks, though the date wasn’t specified.
The points hadn’t posted on Monday either and there was no indication the purchase was tracked under “My Shop & Earn.” Yesterday, I got fed up with waiting and decided I was going to email them to see what’s shaking. After all, points are supposed to show up in your ledger within 2-7 days and then take another 32 days to post. It had been exactly 3 months since I had made this purchase.
I clicked on the Swaybacks confirmation email, which has a link to the Shop & Earn Ledger. To my surprise, my points had posted! Not only that, but I apparently generated about 13,000 points from referrals as well (thanks guys!). The total 36,000 points is good for about $350 in Paypal cash or Hyatt gift cards. With the trip I’m planning for December and the mattress run I’ll inevitably have to do to maintain my hyatt Diamond next year, the Hyatt gift cards are looking pretty good.
Other worthwhile gift cards include Royal Caribbean, the Global Hotel Card by Orbitz, Amazon, Target, iTunes, and Starbucks. Along with many other popular retailers and a few non-profit organizations. It’s worth noting that you can only redeem up to two rewards per day. Oddly, the “awarded” date is July 30. Even though the points posted on July 29 and I was even able to redeem them.
If you got in on this deal back in April and Swagbucks sent you an email confirming that your purchase was tracked and you’d be receiving a certain number of points, you may want to check your account this week. Chances are your points should be posting around the time mine did.
Your PayPal account was shutdown for no reason? Can you please tell us the account activity before the shutdown?
I haven’t been using Paypal for ms purposes since the CVS shut down, and even before that I was barely using it. I haven’t had any other issues using Paypal, so it’s really out of the blue.
What does Paypal say when you contact them? That is really scary!
I think I’m gonna let it go. At least I didn’t lose any funds and I’m fine not doing business with them anymore. On to greener pastures. 🙂
Yours made it further than mine did with the cash back portal. I went with extrabux before they stopped paying for gift cards. Money posted to the account but was “pending” for 3 months and then just disappeared. I contacted them with all the evidence of the purchase and they put it back into pending for another 3 months on one transaction and on the larger one they simply said that they were sorry but they couldn’t verify and I was out of luck. I lost $40 on that one.
That sounds like such a hassle. Did you have screenshots of your transaction? This is unfortunate, but pretty common in dealing with shopping portals.