Review: Swagbucks Shop

Attribution: Swagbucks and Prodege LLC

One of the oldest types of GPT opportunities online has been the click-through cash back websites (like Ebates). As you can imagine since you’re reading this, Swagbucks has its own type of click-through shopping program called Swagbucks Shop (sometimes referred to as Shop and Earn). So how does it work and is it worth it? Read on to find out.

How it Works

Before shopping online, you go to the Swagbucks Shop section of its website. After you find the online store you need to shop at, you click on the store to earn SB for every dollar you spend. How many SB you earn will depend on the store you shop at. Most stores will give 1 or 2 SB for every dollar you spend. But many will give much more, sometimes in excess of 10 SB for dollar spent (this is the same as 10% cash back).

After you click on the store’s link on Swagbuck’s website, it’ll take you to your online store and you shop like normal. That’s it!

After your shopping trip is over, the SB will show up in your Swagbucks account anywhere from 10 days to several months (92 days or so) after the purchase. If you purchase a hotel stay, the “clock” for when you are supposed to receive your SB doesn’t start until after your stay is complete and paid for.

Ideally, your SB will appear as pending within 10 days of completing the purchase, with the SB showing up within a month or so after that.

How Reliable Is Swagbucks’ Shop?

Compared to their Offer wall, it’s pretty reliable. In my experience, about 50% of Shop sessions work perfectly and 45% require submitting a ticket to Swagbucks and getting paid that way, with about 5% of shop sessions resulting in no SB. I’ll explain what I mean.

First of all, the above percentages are estimates and based on places I typically shop, like Target, Walmart, eBay and Amazon.com. In my personal experience, Petco, Tracfone and eBay are the most reliable in that you get your SB without having to submit a ticket and within the time frame Swagbucks provides you.

The most unreliable are the hotel Shop sessions. I’d estimate that about 90% of SB from hotel stays never show up as pending or get credited until AFTER I submit a ticket reporting the missing SB. But in the vast majority of situations, Swagbucks will promptly credit me my missing SB…that is until recently.

A few months ago, I went on a road trip, where I spent about a week across several hotels. Each hotel I reserved online through Swagbucks Shop. And as expected, NONE of them showed up as pending or credited, even after 95+ days of waiting after the hotel stay.

So I opened tickets with these hotel stays and the first one Swagbucks immediately credited like they normally do. This one was worth a few hundred SB. But some worth a few thousand SB (I think I was earning 12 or 15 SB for each dollar spent), Swagbucks refused to honor.

What really gets me is that their “reason” for not crediting the SB isn’t even on point. Their boilerplate email discusses why some offers don’t credit and how not all surveys credit due to disqualification or other reasons. Nothing in the email mentions anything about Swagbucks Shop. I immediately followed up asking for the real reason and have not gotten a response after almost a week.

Honestly, I’ll probably never see those missing SB and I still have other hotel stays and thousands of SB still waiting to be credited. I’ll be surprised if I get those, too. This recent experience is not the norm from a historical perspective. But what I’m afraid of is if it’s the NEW norm.

I spent a lot of extra time going through the Swagbucks website and keeping detailed records of my Swagbucks Shop purchases to make sure I get credited when I have to submit a ticket. Now I know that it may all be for nothing.

And let me clarify that I don’t think Swagbucks is ripping me off. If they’re not giving me my SB, I’m confident they’re not getting their money either from the hotel I stayed at. But what is frustrating is that obviously something isn’t working despite me doing exactly what I’m supposed to do and all Swagbucks can do is cut and paste a completely off point “explanation” of why they won’t give me my SB.

Now, I can’t rely on getting my Shop SB credit like I should, even if I do everything correctly. Until Swagbucks can explain what’s going on or what I’m doing wrong, I won’t use the Shop feature as much on Swagbucks.

Ok, rant over.

Importance of Swagbucks Shop

Notice how Swagbucks doesn’t offer tax documents even if you earn more than $600 from their website in a calendar year? One theory for this is that many people, such as myself, earn a lot of SB through Shop and other “non-income generating activities.” So much of the “income” I earn from Swagbucks isn’t actually income as far as the IRS is concerned. Even when I earn 10 SB for each dollar I spend, that’s only 10 cents back for every dollar I spend. If I needed to report my Swagbucks Shop earnings as income, I’d probably be able to claim the purchase of whatever I bought online as a tax loss. How awesome would that be?!

Imagine that brand new refrigerator I bought from Home Depot for $1,000 with 2 SB back for each dollar spent resulting in not only getting back 2,000 SB (that’s $20), but also being able to offset those earnings with my cost basis of $980. Yeah...no, the IRS ain’t havin' that.

So long story short, I think it’s actually a good thing that Swagbucks has this Shop program on their website, even if it doesn’t always work right. I suppose Swagbucks could separate SB income activities (like Watch) from non-income activities (like Shop), but that’s a huge increase in recording keeping that Swagbucks wants no part of and the law doesn’t require (presumably).

Bottom Line

Swagbucks Shop can result in significant earnings for things you’d be buying anyways. But it doesn’t always work. However, most of the time Swagbucks will credit you your SB when things don’t go right. There’s no guarantee they will always do this, though.