QuidCo.Com

I've tried more than my fair share of money making sites on the internet, some have been good, others rather disapointing. I decided to give Quidco a go in August 2006 as I had heard good things about it, here's my verdict so far.

The Concept
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Quidco advertises itself as a "cashback cooperative" which is a pretty meaningless term in itself. What it amounts to in essence is a website stuffed ...
...flog you their stuff. When you normally click on these advertising links, the referring website will earn commission if the potential customer actually buys anything. Quidco are simply passing this commission onto their users.

Of course they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Oh no, in todays capitalist age where everyone is out for themselves, they charge all their members £5 a year for being a Quidco member. However, ... more

I've tried more than my fair share of money making sites on the internet, some have been good, others rather disapointing. I decided to give Quidco a go in August 2006 as I had heard good things about it, here's my verdict so far.

The Concept
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Quidco advertises itself as a "cashback cooperative" which is a pretty meaningless term in itself. What it amounts to in essence is a website stuffed full of links to various company websites who want to flog you their stuff. When you normally click on these advertising links, the referring website will earn commission if the potential customer actually buys anything. Quidco are simply passing this commission onto their users.

Of course they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Oh no, in todays capitalist age where everyone is out for themselves, they charge all their members £5 a year for being a Quidco member. However, they only charge you if you actually earn a minimum of £5, so you wont end up owing them money.

It's a good idea in theory, a win-win situation as nobody loses out (although maybe this isn't sustainable, I touch on this near the end) the companies get their sales, the customer get's a nice bit of cashback and Quidco get their five pounds of flesh too.

What surprised me was the amount of cashback it is possible to earn. There's the expected sums of around 2% off at Play.com, but then there are offers like £125 cashback for taking out house insurance with Barclays. (these offers are always changing so I can't guarantee they will be available when you read this.)

Just to test the site I bought my holiday insurance through Quidco with Marks and Spencers, it came to just over £40 and I got £7 cashback, which was great as I was going to get the insurance with M&S anyway, so £7 to me for nothing, that would buy me a few Pina Coladas!

The Site
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Quidco is fairly user-friendly, it isn't graphic intensive so it loads quite quickly and the pages are clear and uncluttered.

Signing up is simple, just give the usual details such as username etc and then you can start getting cashback.

You can search for websites which offer cashback by typing in their name or use the menu on the homepage to narrow it down by category, such as "Entertainment" or "Finance" etc.

There are hundreds of offers through Quidco which means that pretty much whenever you plan buying anything over the net you will find a cashback opportunity through Quidco.

Practicalities
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When you want to earn cashback, all you do is visit Quidco, login and then find the retailers website on the Quidco site. There aren't any adverts as such, you just see a link with a brief description of what the retailer is all about, clicking this link takes you to their website.

Once you arrive at the retailers site, you just do what you normally would do, there's no need to enter any promotional codes etc, just buy what you want to buy and pay as normal.

Quidco track all purchases through several stages until you actually get your cashback. The first stage is "Tracked" where you can see that your purchase has actually been recorded by Quidco. You can see all the stages on your own customer account page. It's worth nothing that the system isn't 100% reliable (I'll go into this in more detail at the end) and some merchants are more reliable (and quicker) than others. You get information relating to reliability or merchants as well as speed of paying out and what they do if there are disputes etc on the merchant page in Quidco itself. If you find a transaction hasn't been recorded you can appeal and quite often the merchant will still pay the cashback or a portion of it once investigation has taken place - I can't comment on this myself as every transaction I have instigated has been tracked successfully. (Update - this is no longer the case, as I will elaborate on later).

Once successfully "tracked", the next stage is "validated" which means the merchant has agreed to pay the cashback one they have done the checks at their end.

Next comes the "received" status, where Quidco have received the money and are holding it ready to be paid to you. You can specify to have the money paid once your account reaches a certain balance and also payments only take place at a certain time during the month so cash moving from "received" to "paid" takes a few days or so.

You can choose to have funds sent to you through Paypal (free) or for the exorbitant charge of 5 whole pence, they will send it to any UK bank account by BACS, takes up to 10 days for this option.

Summary
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I've been using Quidco for 6 months or so now and just received my first payout of £170 from them, very nice. I've another £50 worth of transactions waiting to be validated.

It's been a very smooth experience with no real issues, just a minor problem where my bank account details didn't appear to be showing up properly. I was just about to send a message to Quidco about this when I noticed that the money was in my account so it was correct, just that screen on their site isn't very user friendly, in my opinion anyway.

There are a couple of other points to note, there is a "Quidco blog" which you can read on the front page with notes about new offers etc and you can also sort the various retailers by how new to the site they are or how lucrative their offers are. It's very handy to sort the retailers so you can easily find the most lucrative deal.

Tips
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One thing I'd recommend is whenever you need any form of insurance renewing is to check Quidco as the cashback offers for home, car and life insurance are very good, over £100 can be made from one such transaction. If you swap your insurance around every year then you could make £200 plus per annum from this alone.

What I tend to do is go to www.confused.com (or similar) to see what quotes I can get and then check on Quidco to see which of the best quoting companies also offer cashback. Often the best quote isn't the one I accept as there is a good chance a company offering a quote for an extra few pounds is offering £100 cashback through Quidco, which in total makes it the more cost effective offer.

It's a good idea to use a similar system when buying other things from the internet, check the best price using www.kelkoo.co.uk or www.pricerunner.co.uk and see which of the resulting merchants is offering cashback. Then take into account how much the cashback is for and the price the item is being sold for by the various retailers before actually buying.

While a lot of the time you might only get back say 5% of your purchase it does add up quite quickly depending on how much shopping you do on the internet. If only Ebay offered cashback I would soon be rich due to my wife's Ebay habit!

(Updated - they do now offer commission when using Ebay, as I type this they give 50% cash-back for any fees incurred when buying /selling)

The only real drawback to using Quidco is the delay in receiving your cash. It can often take 3 months from actually making your purchase until you receive the cashback due to the processes used, but all good things come to those who wait I suppose. I will be using my money for things that I would normally be saving up for anyway, such as extra holiday spending money so time isn't really an issue as far as I am concerned.

One thing to bear in mind is cookies. You need to have these enabled to ensure your transactions are validated correctly. If you are using Internet Explorer you can check this by going to "Tools", then "Internet Options", "Privacy" and then choosing "Advanced". There are options here to allow cookies or to "prompt" which is what I recommend you choose. You can then allow cookies from Quidco and the retailers you visit from their site, so you are much more likely to get your transactions validated.

You can then choose to block cookies from sites you don't trust, although cookies are fairly benign.

The Future
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I touched on this earlier on, it's all well and good getting hundreds of pounds a year in cashback, but is it sustainable? In my opinion it probably will be, at least until everyone discovers Quidco or similar sites.

The problem is if a large volume of people start to use Quidco and switch their insurance every year to get the larger cashback awards. I suspect that the companies offering such incentives are relying on the new customers staying with them for a few years to be able to afford such sums. In my case Barclays paid me £125 for a house insurance policy which costs me £22 a month, so £264 for a year, their giving me about half my money back. It's a good price for the insurance anyway, I was paying £36 a month for similar cover with another insurer, who I shopped around for the cheapest price anyway!

One other thing to note is that there is always the chance people abusing the system might kill it off. Recently a health insurance company withdrew their offer as people had signed up, got their cashback and then cancelled their policies in large numbers. A good case of the minority spoiling things for the many, but Quidco have taken steps to try to reduce this type of thing happening in future, one reason why payments take a few months.

I suspect that the 7.5% type deals offered by the likes of HMV etc will continue though, so it's not all doom and gloom!

I've added a screenshot below showing my Quidco account, just so you can see I really have been paid!

Update 19th September 2007:

I earned very nearly £500 in my first year with Quidco and have received every penny!

Update 11th April 2008

Now after about 2 years I've received over £700 from Quidco. I've had one "missing" transaction which is still being investigated, but can't really complain can I?

Update 25th August 2008

Now earned over £1,000 in total and the missing transaction has been found and sorted out, the money is mine! 

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