【2021.12 Update】Some readers found a notice published by Giving Assistant telling creditors to quickly retrieve their property or risk losses. It certainly looks like the company may be heading for bankruptcy, so we recommend avoiding it going forward. If the company is insolvent, your cashback will almost certainly be gone. If you still have money in your account, withdraw it as soon as possible. The homepage itself does not mention bankruptcy, but it does include an official link to this notice.
【12/23 Update】This cashback portal added a paid membership that costs $5.99 per year. Compared with the free membership, paid members can earn 2x cashback at all merchants. The good news is that existing users who registered earlier were automatically given the paid membership benefits, and they also do not need to pay the annual fee in the future. After the doubling, the cashback rates are still fairly competitive. It is also worth mentioning that Giving Assistant offered 4% cashback at google express, which was pretty unique.
- Giving Assistant sign-up link ($5 sign-up bonus)
Contents [Hide]
About Giving Assistant
Recently, many places have been heavily promoting a new cashback portal—Giving Assistant. Its main feature is that shopping on Amazon through this site can generate a 1.5% donation (it used to be 5% cashback). Also, unlike other cashback portals that pay out once every three months, this site used to offer daily payouts to a Debit card, which was a great feature for people who like getting paid quickly.
Like cashback portals such as Ebates, TopCashback, and Upromise, you click through Giving Assistant merchant links to shop at participating stores and earn rewards based on your purchase amount. If you are not familiar with how cashback portals work, you can refer to: Introduction to Cashback Portals.
At its peak, this site was most famous for offering 5% cashback on virtually all Amazon purchases, which helped it quickly build a large user base. But those glory days are gone. Now, the Amazon rewards from this site can only be used for charitable donations.
However, very few other cashback portals provide rewards on all Amazon purchases, so if you shop on Amazon often, do not forget that you can use this portal to contribute to charity—especially since you can donate to charities related to China. I will cover this specifically in section 4.
Sign-Up Bonus
Most cashback portals offer some kind of sign-up bonus. Upromise recently offered $20+$5, EBATES has long offered a $10 gift card, and TopCashback sometimes offers $10. Giving Assistant, however, only offered a $5 sign-up bonus if you registered through a referral link.
- Sign-up link ($5 sign-up bonus)
After registering, you could immediately see the $5 in pending status in your account. If you had already selected a payout method, then payment would be sent according to the schedule described above.
Payout Methods
In addition to PayPal and mailed Check, the site also offered payout to a Debit card. According to the official statement, once you had at least $5.99 in cashback, all three payout methods were free. Specifically:
- 【Not available to new users】Debit card payout was once per day (3pm Pacific Time)
- PayPal was once per week
- Check was once every three months
Donation Settings
You could choose to donate a certain percentage of your cashback to a charitable organization, which was one of this site's distinctive features. You could find this option under myaccount-setting.
By default, donations went to a food-related charity, but you could change it to any charity you preferred by searching directly. I would of course pick one related to China (these should all be US-based organizations related to charitable causes in China, probably not something like Project Hope in China itself).
In addition to donating a certain percentage of your cashback, the 1.5% Amazon reward would be donated 100% in full to the organization you selected.
Things to Watch Out for on Amazon
My main reason for using this cashback portal was to earn Amazon rewards for donations, because many other sites only offered rewards in certain Amazon categories, while this portal covered most purchases. So let us take a closer look at the key things to keep in mind when using it on Amazon:
- Your browser must allow cookie
- Turn off ad-blocking software
- Empty your Amazon cart before purchasing (first enter Amazon through this site, then add the items you need on the new page)
- You receive the cashback after the item ships
The official policy says cashback is generally not available in the following situations:
- Purchases made with gift cards, or purchases from third-party sellers
- Purchasing AMAZON.com Credit
- Subscribe and save orders
- Shipping and taxes, wireless carrier-related purchases, alcoholic products, the Amazon APP store, activation fees
- … (the full list can be found on the official website)
Tips for Use 【Now this only applies to doubling the 1.5% donation】
【Unverified】The main trick was to combine it with a credit card that earned high rewards at Amazon. That way, you could get the credit card's own rewards (5%-10%) plus the rewards offered by this portal (5%). Some readers claimed that if you went through this portal, buying Amazon gift cards could also earn cashback. In that case, you could first buy gift cards with your credit card, then use the gift cards to shop, creating a Double Dip. That would mean going through the cashback portal twice and earning a total of 5%+5%+credit card rewards. Whether or not this was a BUG, if payouts were daily, the idea was to get paid first and worry later.
Which Credit Card to Use? (Q4)
Discover it: In the fourth quarter, the best card to pair with this was probably Discover. That is because the Discover it credit card itself offered 5% cashback at Amazon, and new applicants plus some users already enrolled in Double CashBack could earn an additional matching amount the following year equal to their total cashback for the current year (for example, if you earned $121 this year, you could get another $121 next year). That effectively meant 10% cashback from the credit card alone at Amazon. If you do not yet have a Discover card, see “Discover it Credit Card Review” to apply.
Chase Freedom: Similarly, Chase Freedom also offered 5x on Amazon in Q4. Those points could be transferred through another card, Sapphire Preferred, into UA airline miles for award tickets, making that 5x roughly equivalent to 8% cashback. So, the total came to 18% back, putting it in second place. If you are interested in this card, see “Chase Freedom Credit Card Review” to apply.
Barclays SallieMae: This card offered 5% cashback at Amazon year-round, ranking third. Unfortunately, it is no longer available for new applications.
Of course, if you had an older version of Citi Forward that earned 5x at Amazon, that was also pretty nice. For more ways to save on Amazon, see the article below:
Specific Workflow
Here is a specific example of how to Double Dip. Suppose we use a Discover credit card to buy a camera lens worth $100:
- Log in to your Amazon account, empty the cart, then close that window
- Open the GivingAssistant page
- Search for Amazon and click the Shop Now link (this page will automatically redirect to AMAZON.com)
- Search for an Amazon gift card, buy a $100 E giftcard, choose to send it to your own email, and pay with a Discover credit card (earn 5%+10%)
- After receiving the gift card, close that Amazon window
- Reopen the GivingAssistant page
- Search for Amazon and click the Shop Now link (this page will automatically redirect to AMAZON.com)
- Search for the camera lens you want
- At check out, pay with the gift card received by email (earn 5%)
So when we purchased the gift card the first time, we received 5% cashback from the portal and 10% from Discover. Then when we actually bought the camera lens the second time, we received another 5% cashback from the portal.
Important Note
Because the cashback portal's official site said it could not guarantee cashback when paying with gift cards, that final 5% was not officially protected. So if you get it, great; if not, do not be too upset.
Summary
There are more and more cashback portals these days, so choosing a good one matters. If you shop on Amazon all the time, and want to make those purchases feel a little less guilty, you could use this portal to donate 1.5% to charities related to China for free, which might ease the guilt a bit, haha.