Cashback sites: Earn money for clicks.
We have been talking about cashback sites for years. Often a useful way to make some extra money, we are shocked by how many of our readers still don’t use them. One of our team uses them to do her full Christmas shop and the credit she uses to buy gifts. So this is real money.
The idea of a cashback site, is to get cash reward when you click through from them to buy goods or financial products.
Websites such as Quidco and TopCashback offer cashback on a variety of goods and services, from mobile phones to car insurance and bank accounts to broadband.
You can be paid cash from some websites when you spend with them, and potentially make £100s a year. They work by sending you to the company through a cashback site, which you then get paid for. You can make as little as sums range from pennies for groceries and small purchases to over £100 for some mobile and broadband contracts.
SOME EXAMPLES OF CASHBACK SITEs we can personally vouch for
Top Cashback is free to use: it also offers a premium version which, if you sign up, will charge up to £5 of what you earn each year and boasts thousands of high street names as well as smaller online sellers. They say you can earn up to £345 cashback per year, which you can withdraw straight into your bank account, Paypal or load up onto gift cards.
Quidco is also a free service, this time offering a premium version which costs £1 of your monthly earnings: again, it offers work with thousands of popular and lesser-known retailers. As with Top Cashback, you can withdraw the money into your bank account, Paypal or convert it into gift cards, and the average earning reported is £300 a year.
Rakuten is a newer cashback site. They have 500 retail partners and offer a free service where you can again transfer your cashback into your bank account. They also offer ‘Rakuten Points’ instead of cash back, which has extra value when buying items on their site. £1 of cashback coverts to £1.20 worth of points which you can spend on gift vouchers, movies, Rakuten TV, eBooks and audiobooks.
CHOOSE A CASHBACK WEBSITE
Register with one or more cashback sites. As we’ve detailed above, many sites are free to join but some charge an annual fee, sometimes for a premium version of the account which affords you more opportunities to earn cash back.
LOOK FOR DEALS
Search the website to see if your favourite retailers/financial services firms are offering deals on the products and services that would suit you personally.
CLICK THROUGH
Click the link provided by the cashback site instead of going direct: this way, you are using the cash back site as the referral source, and can earn cash back from the click. Oh, and if you’ve used the site before, make sure you DELETE YOUR INTERNET COOKIES before clicking through, so the cash back site will see that your click comes from their source.
COMPLETE PURCHASE
The retailer will then send the commission to your cashback site and pay a percentage of the money into your bank or PayPal account. With many of these sites, you could need to reach a cashback threshold before you can withdraw funds: each site has their own rules, so check before you use them.
MAXIMISING CASHBACK SITES
CASHBACK FREEBIES
TopCashback and Quidco, as we’ve said, have offers that make you free money for completing surveys, entering prize draws or even obtaining price quotes from comparison websites.
RECOMMEND A MATE
A lot of cashback sites offer you a bonus if you recommend a friend by sending an email using the website’s dedicated referrals page. The email will contain a link to the cashback site with a code to confirm it was you who gave the recommendation. Remember, you won’t be rewarded yourself until the referred friend earns a certain amount of cashback themselves, so make sure to let them know they need to shop once they’ve signed up.
LONGEVITY
There are long-term benefits of signing up to a cash back site, for services such as internet and car insurance. The following sites for example, offer these rewards:
- AA car insurance £15-£20 per policy
- Asos 1.3%-6.8% of purchase’s cost
- BT broadband £34-£97.75 per package
- Currys 0.75%-18.75% of purchase’s cost
- JD Sports 1.3%-17% of purchase’s cost
- O2 mobile £5-£85 per contract
Do check whether credit card, mobile phone or insurance providers are registered on cashback sites before entering into a contract with them.
HOLIDAY CASHBACK
This is a nice one: you can book your holiday through a cashback site, and there are some great deals available on flights and hotels, and then car hire, travel insurance and airport car parking.
GIFT CARDS
If you want to withdraw funds as a gift card with a specific retailer rather than have it put into your bank account, you will get a top-up on your cashback: there is a large list of retailers that offer gift cards.
HIGH STREET CASHBACK
Quidco’s ClickSnap app has a wide range of offline cashback deals, which are pretty simple: buy the product first, then upload a photo of the receipt. You can also earn offline cashback via TopCashback’s in-store cashback scheme. The cashback will automatically appear in your account whenever you buy something with the card you registered.
CASHBACK CREDIT CARDS
You can earn extra cashback on your online purchases by paying for your goods with a cashback credit card, which pays you back a percentage of what you spend on them. As with all credit cards, do try and pay off your balance in full at the end of the month in order to avoid interest.
WATCH OUT FOR…
CASHBACK WEBSITE FEES
Some sites offer free signup or a premium site and don’t require upfront payment, but some of the lesser-known websites might charge you a fee to sign up, or require you to clock up a certain amount of cashback before you can withdraw your funds
COOKIES
Whenever you surf the internet, a cookie (information about the sites you visit) trail begins, so you have to make a new cookie trail between the cashback site and online retailer in order to earn the money: do this by deleting your internet cookies BUT make sure you’ve saved any important information you have stored on your computer that would normally be autofilled for you: passwords and logins, for example.
SHOP AROUND
Cashback sites CAN offer you better deals than elsewhere, but make sure before you sign up, because it isn’t always the case. You may get the same or an even better deal from non-cash back sites, so compare prices before you use the service.
LATE PAYMENTS
All of the above can mean it takes time for the money to appear in your account: it’s not always instantaneous. So if payment just isn’t turning up when you think it should, use the site’s official cashback claim link.
A final note: if you’re starting out, Quidco or TopCashback are two of the bigger sites and are a great start if you’re thinking of getting into these cash back sites. Good luck!
