FatWallet

» see fatwallet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

FatWallet was the kind of thing american deal hunters lived inside, and i was not one of them. Cashback portals and rebate stacking were a US retail sport, tied to store credit cards and mail-in offers that did not exist for me in Turkey. My bargain instinct went into hardware prices on donanimhaber, not into a Wisconsin coupon forum. So this one is an obituary written from the outside, for a community i respected without ever joining.

Tim Storm founded it in 1999 in Wisconsin. The idea was simple: a forum where people posted deals and rebate offers, heavy on computers and electronics, plus a cashback layer that paid you a cut for shopping through their links. The forum was the heart of it. Members hunted down mistakes retailers had made and shared them within minutes, and a good thread could clear stock across the country before a store noticed.

The ownership chain is what finally did it. Storm sold FatWallet to Ebates in 2011. Rakuten bought Ebates in 2014, and FatWallet came along in that deal. For a while the two coexisted, but Rakuten already ran Ebates for exactly this purpose. On 9 october 2017, around four in the afternoon, fatwallet.com went offline and began redirecting to Ebates.com. Storm, who had told himself in 2011 that selling meant giving up the right to complain, said he was proud of what they built and sad to watch it go.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

Underneath the cashback pitch, FatWallet was a forum culture. The regulars were relentless about finding value, and the board carried its own etiquette about how to post a deal and how to warn when one was dead. That is the part that does not migrate. When a redirect replaces a community, the payout mechanic survives and the people scatter.

~ the long tail ~

FatWallet died in the same stretch that thinned out a whole class of deal sites. The rebate and cashback business consolidated into a few large players, and independent forums built on decades of user threads were worth more as a redirect than as a living thing to the company that owned them. The archive of eighteen years of bargain lore did not come back.

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