Earn money while you shop

November 5, 2007

I’m sure when you go shopping in Tesco, Sainsbury’s or even Asda you get asked at the till if you’d like some cashback? Sadly, as we all know, this isn’t some free offer where they give you cash out the goodness of their hearts in exchange for you actually shopping in their stores. It comes out of your bank account.

If you didn’t know that, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a bank account. Please stop reading now.

If you did know that, what you might not realise is the term ‘cashback’ when related to a website DOES in fact offer you cash out of the goodness of the hearts of the website owners, in exchange for using them to shop.

Surely that’s nonsense you might be thinking. Well no, in fact it’s not. If you’ve ever seen advertisements promising such unlikely offers such as ‘earn money while you shop’ or ‘get paid to buy your groceries’ there’s a good chance they are in fact real.

How does this work? How can I get some of this free cash?

A cashback website is basically a shopping portal website that is affiliated with numerous online retailers, usually high street brand names such as the aforementioned Tesco, Sainsbury’s and yes, even Asda. The owners of the website earn affiliate commissions whenever someone (you) purchases something via their link, but unlike regular affiliate schemes the cashback website offers to share the affiliate commissions with the buyer (yup, you again).

So basically you get the Affiliate commissions on offer through an affiliate scheme just by using the cashback site when you shop.

The cashback site then earns its money either by taking a subscription from its users (sadly this time it’s also you, sorry) on an annual basis, or by deducting a percentage of the affiliate commission. If you happen to spend a lot of money online then paying a £5 subscription every year is small change. You’ll earn more than that just by purchasing an iPod for example.

So, if you’re looking to do your Christmas shopping online this year it might be worth your while looking for a decent cashback site first, you could save yourself a few hundred pounds in affiliate commission.

What the emergence of cashback sites means for the affiliate marketing industry is another matter though, one that has stirred up quite a debate about the direction of the industry as a whole; but that’s for another blog.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing