When cashback doesn't track (and how to protect yourself)

If you're here because cashback you were counting on never turned up, start with this: it is usually fixable, and the causes are almost always small, specific things rather than bad luck. Cashback from a shopping portal, a site that pays you for starting your purchase there, tracks only when its cookie survives from your click to checkout. Cashback usually pays out, but not always: sometimes you do everything right and a purchase still doesn't track. This guide explains how cashback tracking works, why a purchase still misses it, and what to do about the one in front of you. It has happened to us too, which is a large part of why this site exists (that story's on the About page).

How cashback tracking works after you click

When you click through a portal, it drops a tracking cookie and forwards you to the store. If that cookie is intact when you check out, the store reports the sale back, the portal gets paid, and eventually you do too.

Almost every tracking failure is really a broken link somewhere in that chain. The good news: most breaks are things you control.

The most common ways it breaks

Ad blockers, the number-one silent killer. Ad blockers and tracking-blockers (uBlock, Privacy Badger, Brave's shields, Safari's stricter modes) often stop a portal's tracking cookie from landing. The click looks normal; the cookie never lands. Fixes, easiest first:

• Pause or allowlist your blocker for both the portal and the store before you click through. Allowlisting just means telling the blocker to leave those two sites alone; most blockers put it behind their toolbar icon.
• Use an incognito / private window. This works when your extensions are disabled there, which is the default in most browsers, but worth confirming, because some blockers (and Brave's built-in shields) still run in private mode.
• Keep a dedicated clean browser profile with no blocking extensions, used only for portal shopping. It's slightly more technical, but it's the durable fix: set it up once and blockers stop being a cause of misses.

Outside coupon codes and auto-apply extensions. A portal only gets paid if its link was the last one you clicked before checkout. A code from a random coupon site, or a browser extension that auto-applies codes, can take that spot and reassign the commission, so your portal earns nothing (how last-click attribution works). Turn off auto-coupon extensions at checkout, and only use codes the portal itself surfaces.

Gift cards, two different things people conflate:

• Buying a gift card usually earns nothing. Gift-card purchases are a common excluded category. The exceptions worth knowing: a grocery fuel-points promo (where the reward is fuel points, not portal cashback) or a discounted gift-card marketplace like Fluz. And if your real goal is just a lower final price, a discounted gift card from a reseller can sometimes beat the portal route, so check the final price on both before you assume the portal wins.
• Paying with a gift card may violate a portal's terms and void tracking on paper, yet in practice these purchases sometimes still track. If you go this route, treat it as an experiment: some unusual payment methods track fine and some don't, and the only way to know is to try a small one and see.

Excluded categories and marketplace sellers. Subscriptions, taxes, shipping, and third-party sellers frequently don't count. Check your portal's terms for its own list.

The pre-purchase ritual (30 seconds)

1. Disable or allowlist your ad/tracking blocker for this purchase.
2. Click through from the portal, and don't open the store in a new tab.
3. Skip outside coupon codes and auto-apply extensions; use only what the portal shows.
4. Buy in the same tab, then screenshot the order confirmation.

Do these four things and you rule out the most common avoidable misses.

When it doesn't track anyway

Give it time first: many portals show pending cashback in a few days, but some take weeks. If it never appears, most portals have a missing-cashback claim form; that order-confirmation screenshot is exactly what they'll ask for. File within the portal's claim window, its deadline for filing, which is often 30–90 days from the purchase (some portals, mostly airline and miles programs, allow 180 days or a year). Claims can take a while to review, so be patient. We track 44 portals' rates (see them all), but every one of them handles claims on its own terms, so read theirs. If you're not sure which cause applies, run the 60-second self-test before filing, or read what to do when cashback is not tracking.

Once tracking is second nature, the next lever is combining rewards: stacking a portal, card, and coupon on one purchase.