Shopping portals for workplace purchases?

[ketchup]

Hey guys, I'm not sure what to think about this.

Ebates as a 15% back offer for Dell.com small business purchases this week.  I buy stuff for work (with company credit card) all the time from Dell.  If I buy $3k of computers today, that would be $450 to my Ebates account.

This wouldn't cost my workplace anything, but it still feels very wrong. Or, is this just like using your frequent flier account when flying for a business trip?

How am I supposed to feel about this?

[YttriumNitrate]

I think you're fine so long as the purchase was made because the company needed the item and would be purchased in a different manner had the rebate producing portal not been used.

For what it's worth, I regularly run about several thousand a month worth of business expenses through my personal credit card that gives 2% cash back. I like this arrangement because I get tax free money, and my company likes it because it simplifies accounting. At my old job we paid all the expenses through a deposit account and it seemed like every week there was some email and/or meeting about the funding level in the deposit account and whether an expense could be paid...what a hassle.

[ketchup]

Thanks, that makes me feel a little better.  I definitely would be buying these computers anyway.

[terran]

This is the same suggestion as I gave in Teltic's unethical thread: Would you feel comfortable telling your boss what you're doing?

If there's no additional cost to the company and it's not changing your behavior then it shouldn't really matter, but whether or not it changes your behavior is probably the thing that's hard to measure. Will you be slightly less likely to search for better deals from other vendors without ebates cash back? Will you order things that you would have waited to order (time value of money) or might you have tried to make do with what you have instead of ordering new? The intention of these shopping portal deals is to get people to change behavior, so just watch out of that.