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Shop at Home
【8/3】Unfortunately, SAH discontinued its 110% match policy starting August 2. The cashback portal Shop at Home (SAH) has long been one of the best commonly used cashback sites. Its missed-tracking rate is very low, and it also used to offer a 110% match policy against several other cashback portals, including TopCashback and Ebates. In this article, we’ll give readers a brief introduction to this site.
Sign-Up and Referral Program
Signing up for Shop at Home now gets you an immediate $10 cashback bonus. Unfortunately, unlike TopCashback and Ebates, SAH does not offer a referral program.
Some Deals
- Hertz 5%, while TopCashback only offers 3%.
- eBay 1.5% cashback, slightly better than TopCashback’s 1.1% and Splender’s 1%.
- Before 7/1, Priceline offered up to 24% cashback. Express Deal purchases could earn 15%, and Bid hotel bookings could earn 12%, while TopCashback only offered 5% on both.
But those are not the main attraction, because SAH had an even bigger killer feature.
110% Cash Back Guarantee
The 110% cashback rate match policy was one of SAH’s most important features, and it was extremely easy to use. That was also the main reason we recommended this site. Specifically, if you found that one of the following cashback portals offered a higher rate for a merchant than SAH did, you could submit a claim:
- Ebates
- TopCashback
- Extrabux
- Fat Wallet
- MR Rebates
- Befrugal
Fat Wallet had already been acquired by Ebates and was on its way out as a cashback site. TopCashback and Ebates were both very popular portals, but TopCashback was often criticized because multiple purchases on the same day occasionally did not track accurately. If we shifted our shopping through SAH instead, not only could we avoid that issue, we could also earn an extra 10% cashback. Of course, this only worked if SAH also offered cashback for that merchant. If SAH did not offer any cashback for the merchant at all, then there was nothing to match. Here’s how it worked: Suppose Xiaoming wanted to buy a pair of shoes at famous footwear. First, he could use Cashback Monitor to compare cashback rates across the major portals and find that SAH offered 4%, while Ebates happened to be running an anniversary promotion offering 15%. In that case, he could find the merchant on SAH and click the 110% Cashback Guarantee button on the far left in the screenshot below to submit a claim.
Once the claim form opened, just fill it out as requested.
After submitting the form, it would go through manual review. However, you actually did not need to wait for the review result. You could immediately click through SAH’s link to the merchant and place the order. As long as the review was approved, you could still receive the 110% cashback guarantee. SAH’s review speed was impressively fast: during business hours, approval emails usually arrived within five minutes, and if submitted after hours, you would typically receive one early the next morning. If you preferred to play it safe, you could also wait until the approval email arrived before placing the order. One important detail is that you must place the order within 48 hours after submitting the request, otherwise you would need to submit another application. Right after submitting the claim form, you would receive a confirmation email containing a timestamp. As long as you placed the order within 48 hours after that timestamp, you would qualify. This also created an advanced strategy: for example, if Ebates offered a one-day high-rate promotion, you could use SAH to effectively extend that offer by 48 hours. In addition, although TopCashback also offered matching for some cashback sites, SAH’s match could be requested before placing the order, the response was almost instantaneous, and you got an extra 10% on top, making it much better than TopCashback.
ShopGold Rewards
Shop at Home not only offered cashback, but also had its own ShopGold Rewards points program. Signing up for ShopGold earned you 25 points. Each purchase would earn a varying number of ShopGold Rewards points, typically 50 points per transaction. And 500 ShopGold Rewards points could be redeemed for a $5 Walmart gift card. That works out to just under $0.50 extra per transaction, which is very worthwhile for smaller purchases.
How Cashback Is Paid
After registering, readers needed to enter and verify their address in the settings so they could receive SAH’s mailed check. If you had $20 or more in confirmed cashback by the end of a given month, that money would be mailed as a check by the end of the third month. In other words, there was about a 60-day hold: cashback earned in January would be mailed by the end of March. Compared with sites like Splender and TopCashback, this policy was not especially good, though it was not a huge problem either. One important thing to note is that the $10 cashback bonus for new user registration did not count toward that $20 threshold. Do you have any experience using cashback portals? Feel free to leave a comment and share with us.