Revolut Revpoints

[dshunter]

It’s a shame it can’t be featured on this site, but I currently generate more points from my Revolut Ultra than any other card via their ‘Shops’ feature – for those that don’t know, basically cashback but with excellent rates (up to 20%) that pay out within 24 hours. Combined with their occasional bonuses, it has been a great card so far, the additional benefits are pretty good and (nearly) worth the fee by themselves if you use them.

When it works it is great. However, I’m finding some things with Shops rather frustrating and frankly if they don’t improve I will consider cancelling, as it is all become a bit of a hassle.

1) Earning rates jumping (or even disappearing) in the middle of the day, these seems to happen quite randomly, including 10 seconds before I checked out at Tesco, and even when I was eating at one of the restaurants that they partner with. You have to enable the offer (bit of a hassle by itself) *and* checkout within 30 mins. This does not lock in the rate though so completely useless for a restaurant!

2) The offers that I have used the most Amazon, Argos, Ebay, Tesco, disappearing completely or reducing to a 2x rate after a few uses. Not sure if this is just bad luck or if the offers are bespoke and they reign in big spending on a single brand. Or perhaps the product will just degrade with time…

3) If for some reason the merchant splits your payment into multiple transactions (e.g. ebay), the points are reversed and Revolut will insist that the transaction was refunded. Again an issue because of their weird 30 minute to checkout in a single transaction thing

I’ve challenged a few of these, with mixed results. Their insistence on using AI as customer service has resulted in some completely bizarre explanations/excuses/hallucinations, and when ‘esclating’ to a human, they’ve agreed to pay out but only after quite a lot of back and forth. I’ve had to escalate 2 of the queries to ‘management’.

How are other people finding the product?

[John]

I don’t use revpoints but in an earlier incarnation of Shops I did notice the rates changing for ebay. It was typically 1% but once I noticed it was 3%, however by the time I loaded money into revolut it had dropped back to 1%.

I kept checking over the next few days and it went back up to 2%, so I decided to take it. I always buy ebay items in individual transactions anyway as I previously had TCB negate a big load of cashback when one item out of several in the transaction was lost in the post. If a seller takes longer than 30 minutes to give a combined postage discount just click through again, it worked for me anyway.

Regarding AI customer service, I bought an item of wooden furniture online for £400 which arrived with minor damage, not affecting the appearance as it was at the back. It took me 5 minutes to repair (using a saw and wood glue). Before starting the repair I emailed the company.

They offered a full refund or replacement, which I tried to explain was not necessary since the damage was inconsequential. Their failure to understand this, or the concept of a partial refund, led me to realise I was talking to an AI. I then noticed they didn’t actually advertise a phone number and it seemed impossible to get a human response via email or chat.

So I accepted the £400 refund when I would have been happy with £20 or so. What I actually wanted was to see if they could replace the panel with the defect, but evidently the company was not interested in employing staff to discuss things like that.