My pal Ginger over at AttentionTargetShoppers emailed this morning to say that she’d gotten a disturbing message when trying to cash out for an Amazon GC at Swagbucks this morning: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, prize orders are limited to 5 per month. Please place your order again next month.”
Twitter has been ablaze with people upset about this today, but it appears that while Swagbucks HAS instituted some redemption limits, it’s not as extreme a change as it seemed at first glance — redemptions are being limited to five per type per month (in other words, five $5 Amazon GCs, five $5 Starbucks GCs, etc.).
Unless you have quite a number of referrals, as Ginger and I do, this change probably won’t impact you at all. If you earn an average of one Swagbuck a day, you’re probably only cashing out once a month anyway. But when you refer a friend, and the friend wins a Swagbuck, you win one, too (up to 100 SB per friend referred), so those of us who’ve been faithfully spreading the word about Swagbucks will be the ones most affected by the change.
Amazon is the cashout of choice for many of us because it’s the best value $5 redemption, at 45 Swagbucks for $5 Amazon. There’s no higher denomination of Amazon GC available on Swagbucks right now, so I’m sure the demand for the $5 Amazon redemption has been tremendous.
Swagbucks recently changed their system to only send Amazon GCs twice a month rather than daily, as they had before. My reaction at the time was that this was just to simplify things administratively. This new redemption limitation may also be for that reason, but if that is the case (and as a faithful Swaggernaut, I hope that’s the reason), we SHOULD see Swagbucks add a $25 or $50 Amazon redemption. That would result in 1/5 or 1/10 of the Amazon cashouts and would demonstrate that the reason for the limits is administrative and not financial.
Swagbucks has RSVP’d for my annual chat tomorrow; hopefully they’ll be able to ease the concerns caused by this new rule.
