FatWallet

Used to be decent. But they got rid of cash back, and now forums are full of crude, vulgar, and just plain asinine people. I'm all about being a part of a frugal community. But these people are a**holes. Terminated my account. Take my deals elsewhere now.

Fatwallet no longer offers cash back as a shopping portal, so the only "value" is through the forums. With each successive buyout/merger, now owned by Rakuten (formerly buy.com), the management has become increasingly more involved in the forums. At one time Fatwallet was a great place to find deals and tips on a daily basis. Deals can still be found, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher. FW staff intrude in the forums with staff-promoted deals. FW is much more heavy-handed in the moderation of the forums, and the moderation is very uneven and unfairly administered. Silly badges and worthless status contests have encouraged users to post quantity over quality. Overall, the quality is pretty mediocre compared to what it once was. Most alarmingly, if one doesn't "toe the company line" and questions the arbitrary, inconsistent, and silly "rainbows and unicorns" artificial sense of community, one can expect to be singled out. Two forum moderators in particular, with usernames Virgil27 and Nellium have behaved so rudely unprofessional to me it's disgusting. They should be fired. Though, I expect it all trickles down from the top. Fatwallet is what it is. It will never be the gem it once was and sadly, it looks to continue to decline.

FatWallet.com already turned into a shameless place that runs bait and switch. And they even canceled my referral credit based on false claim that I self-refer. In fact, the people I refer don't even have a similar name with mine, how can that be the same person? A $#*!ed and ridiculous company.

I used Fatwallet to order a hotel through expedia. Fatwallet offered 5% cash back. I Got ZERO. I have contacted them and like a fellow reviewer said they didn't get paid by my click so i dont get paid. The place is shady $#*! hell. They are owned by ebates.com... STAY FAR AWAY! Goto slickdeals.net for a deals site. Atleast u know what u r getting.

It is becoming obvious that Fatwallet is a shady company. Cash back is almost never processed automatically. A ticket has to be filed and followed up on. Given that the cash back is usually a few dollars it is often not worth the effort. I will be looking for a more honest company and I suggest others do the same.

The site is flooded with spam and bad deals. It used to be such that only truly hot deals were posted, but now many postings are for expired offers, offers with negligible value and self-serving, self-promoting "offers" for those whose sole purpose in posting is to get "badges" of dubious merit.

More recently, the site underwent an "upgrade," and fatwallet's own review pages on the botched upgrade were negative from the start. The fatwallet website editor is still flawed, and complained about often, and has not been fully fixed.

The site owners were in some sort of dispute with their former home state and belligerently left the state for another. They also refuse to discuss how they make money, how they are compensated and how many of their "offers" and deals contain kickbacks. Their rating system used to be fair and subjective, but now they require one to give a reason for a negative review and they are known for banning those who give negative reviews to any offers for any reason -- including common and self-evident ones like not a deal based on price or a bad merchant reputation.

Don't waste you time for a few potential pennies you may get back from a big purchase made through this site --- the site is so poorly managed and operated that you will receive nagging emails from the site itself wanting to know if your pennies ever arrived. It can take many weeks or months to receive anything.

Stick to better sites with objective ratings and you will do much better.

Made a few small purchases to test the cashback, it worked fine.
I then made a very large purchase through a referral link, had all the documentation, but had the cashback denied for apparently no reason.
The deals themself are mostly junk, a few good things here and there but nothing you wouldn't find on your own.

Hot deals have gone downhill since top poster left. Ssite purchased by ebates and now they push the deals that give them the most return. Seems everything is either a Sunday sale item or copied from slickdeals.net a few hours after it is posted there. Free stuff section is terrible.
Not close to what it used to be

I've been a member since 2006. Sometimes I have problems with getting cash back for qualifying purchases. At first, those problems were as simple as just giving them my order receipts and them verifying my click to that merchant. However, this is where their policy, or lack of policy, fails. My last two cash backs were not honored because the merchant (I shopped at the same place) claims I used a different referring source. However, the merchant wouldn't reveal what that source was because it was part of a secured transaction. So what am I left with? Without being able to verify if what the merchant said is true, Fatwallet basically tells me too bad. Here is their quoted response: "After a thorough investigation of this transaction, we have learned that this purchase did not qualify for Cash Back. We were informed that a different source actually referred this order to the store that you made your purchase from. Since this was a secure transaction between yourself and that store, the referring source is considered to be part of that secured transaction. Because FatWallet did not receive credit for referring your purchase, we will not be informed of the name of the source who did receive credit."

This peeves me to no end since I am intelligent enough to know that if I was surfing the merchants site before I went through Fatwallet, then Fatwallet might not be considered the referring site. Because of this, I always make sure to delete cookies and clear my cache so I start with a clean slate through Fatwallet.

Since they were bought by ebates they are only interested in deals from their sponsers. To prove my point you just have to look at the promotion they are currently running where you get a free t-shirt if you post a deal by one of their sponsers. They don't care about real deals anymore, only deals that make THEM money (referal money kicked back to them). Deals are now poor or late after having been posted at another board hours earlier (They even give credit to other boards for the posts, why not just go to the other boards?). They favor a few posters and don't apply the posting rules to them so it has become a very poor site for people to post at and the board reflects this. Not what they used to be and going downhill from there Look at all the reviews of this place (here and other review sites) and you will see almost all negative reviews for 2012 since the changes