For two months probably, Taobao went missing on Shopback. Apparently, they were revamping the mechanism for tracking Taobao purchases through Shopback.
Previously, you had to search for the item you wanted to purchase through the search bar in Shopback’s Taobao page. With the new approach that was just introduced, effective 8 Mar 2017, you can shop on Taobao through Shopback as you would any other merchants on Shopback, i.e. just click “Shop Now” and get redirected to the merchant site. Except, you also need to submit your Taobao order ID using a special form on Shopback.
Despite this extra step, it is somewhat simpler than previously. Just submit the order ID regardless of whether you will actually earn cashback (not all items/sellers are eligible for cashback).
Although i don’t usually get a lot of cashback from Taobao purchases, i still buy more stuff from Taobao than from all other sites combined, so it all adds up. If you are new to Shopback, why wait? Sign up now to start earning cashback for your online shopping (earn an extra S$5 too for your first purchase)!
Update 2 July 2017
Since more than a month ago, Shopback has reverted back to the previous way of tracking cashback for Taobao, so whatever is mentioned above is no longer valid. I guess Shopback must have received too many complaints about the change, or maybe the user submitted data is too prone to error. Whichever the case, consumers continue to benefit from receiving cashback for Taobao purchases.
Update 6 Nov 2017
Shopback has changed the cashback tracking mechanism for Taobao again. Well, in actual fact not much has changed – you still have to search for the item you want to purchase through the ai.taobao.com portal, but now, instead of doing this on Shopback’s Taobao page, you are forced to do this through the Cashback Buddy.
The downside of this approach is you can’t get cashback if you wanted to do your purchase through your phone, because the Cashback Buddy is implemented as a desktop browser extension only. Anyway, the desktop experience of buying stuff from Taobao is far far better than on a phone, so you should use a desktop anyway.
