topcashback.co.uk

Loyalty and Rewards sites are a subject that seems to pop up regularly on Ciao and with the number of these sites increasing steadily, it is hard to decide which one to sign-up to.

Basically they all work in the same way. You sign up to them, visit their web-site and make your internet purchases from the retailers they have on offer . The cash-back will be paid to you through the reward site.


££££££££££££££
...fairly familiar with this kind of scheme, but for all these who are new to this kind of service a bit more information - the rest can straight jump to the next point :

Reward-sites offer you a wide range of companies through which you can purchase the item you are looking for. Usually they cover every aspect of life, from toys, clothing, books, electrical goods,... to services like insurance, mortgages and gambling sites. All you have ... more

Loyalty and Rewards sites are a subject that seems to pop up regularly on Ciao and with the number of these sites increasing steadily, it is hard to decide which one to sign-up to.

Basically they all work in the same way. You sign up to them, visit their web-site and make your internet purchases from the retailers they have on offer . The cash-back will be paid to you through the reward site.

££££££££££££££

Most of you will be fairly familiar with this kind of scheme, but for all these who are new to this kind of service a bit more information - the rest can straight jump to the next point :

Reward-sites offer you a wide range of companies through which you can purchase the item you are looking for. Usually they cover every aspect of life, from toys, clothing, books, electrical goods,... to services like insurance, mortgages and gambling sites. All you have to do is make your purchase through the link on the reward-site - which will lead you straight to the retailers own website - and your reward will be credited to your member account.
These credits can be in points or cash, usually it is a percentage of the amount you've spend, sometimes a fixed amount, dependent on what the retailer is paying to the reward-site.

Often there are other incentives like reading e-mails. In this case the reward site will send you regularly e-mails to your inbox, which you have to open and read, sometimes there's a button to click on. Well, of course it is enough to open them and click on the button - I don't think anyone really reads this stuff!
If you are not to keen on having your inbox littered with spam this is obviously something you should opt out of.

They also offer you the chance to make some money without actually buying anything or receiving any e-mails on a daily base. These are so-called recurring offers or no-purchase/free cash offers.
For some free offers you have to sign up to various other sites that offer competitions or consumer information. While this is a very good way to get some money into your account -for starters - without having to spend one penny, you'll soon realize that these offers, if you take them up, will not only
fill your mailbox in no time at all with an awful lot of spam, but that some of them will ask you a lot of personal questions (like if you own your house, have a mortgage/credit card, etc).

For other ways to make some free cash you'll have to conduct a product search on search-engines like Kelkoo, Pricerunner,...
These are absolute danger free and you won't have to tell them half of your life-story to earn a few pence, but it is, in my opinion, absolute mind-numbing and the rewards that are paid for these activities are minimal, usually in the up to 10 p range.
So, I hope this has made it all a bit clearer and you all know now what it is all about.

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Are you all with me again ? Yes ? Good, then let's continue...

What is a good Loyalty/Rewards-site ?
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As with everything in live, that depends on your very own personal preferences. I can tell you only about mine and they are the base on which this review is written on and why I've chosen Topcashback,com or TCB to be the best one for me:

- I want a website that is easy to navigate with pages that load up quickly

- I do expect a very large range of retailers, so that I will be able to find the item I would like to purchase and the offers should be up-dated regularly. And with that I do not mean monthly, but daily !

- I expect an account that is easy to follow and up-dated daily, so that I do not have to wait for ages to see if a transaction was accounted for. I have a memory like a goldfish and will probably not remember after more than two days ever to have bought something at all !

- I want to see my rewards in good old cash and not in some obscure point system that nobody seems to be able to explain and that seems to change daily.

- I prefer to have the cash paid either by cheque or into my bank account, vouchers are acceptable, but anything else isn't. I do not need any more cups or key-fobs, my children have a piggy-bank each, we already eat more sweets than it is good for us and if I want a bottle of wine I can get one from the money I've earned from my local off-licence (priced in a way that I can understand)

- If I have reached the point where I want my rewards to be paid out I don't want to wait for months - or, like in some sad cases, forever.

Did anyone say that I am fussy ? - I did hear that, you know...

Sadly enough the reality of these Reward-sites doesn't often live up to this for a mile and, after using topcashback.com for a few months, let me share my experience how they have lived up to my expectations so far.

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Look of the web-site / ease of navigation

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The design of the website is very professional with the background being simply white and the colour-scheme being held in un-obtrusive pastel colours, blue for the head of the site, green for the retailer part and orange for the product search. It isn't a busy website at all, there are no blinding colours jumping at you as soon as it opens and, which is the big difference to other reward sites, there are no advertisements or pop-ups blinking at you while you try to find your way around.
All in all it is a very grown-up design that some might find boring, but it works for me. After all, we are here to "earn" money and not to collect lollipops ...

To navigate the site couldn't be any easier. Make your choice from the buttons in the blue part which are self-explanatory. There are :
- Sign in/ View Account
- Home
- Retailers
- Products
- About us
- FAQ's
- Refer a Friend
- How we compare

Usually you will probably want to sign in first which is done easily by typing in your e-mail address and password. This will lead you straight to your account overview.
If you want to go straight for a product or retailer search, which can also be done over the menu's at the left in green (retailers) or at the right in orange (products) then you will be reminded to sign in if you should forget and try to use the link to the retailer without doing so.

The pages load remarkably fast, at least as long as you are with TCB. If you should want to proceed to go to a retailers website it might start to slow down massively, as some of them are very slow to load. As this can hardly be blamed at TCB you'll just have to sit through it and enjoy a cup of tea in the meanwhile...

Product-range/ up-to-date ?
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TCB feature over 1000 on-line shops which cover about every aspect of life. They have most of the big names that do work with this kind of affiliate programmes, as well as hundreds of smaller retailers. Some of the retailers I have bought from through TCB are: LX Direct, Additions Direct, CD Jungle, Zurich Insurance, The Hut, Yves Rocher, Laura Ashley, Comet,...

TCB paid me higher cashback rates for them, than on any other reward site would have, some of them fixed amounts (Zurich Insurance £ 65 for a new home and contents insurance and Yves Rocher £4 on an order over £10.50) the other ones percentages of the amount I had ordered. ( between 4% and 10%).
The offers, as well as the member accounts, are up-dated daily. If an offer should change, which happens regularly, you can find this easiest through the "recently updated offers" section in the green part.
If you visit the site as regularly as I have lately, you'll realise that the numbers of retailers is growing steadily and that there are only very rarely retailers disappearing from their offer.
For brand new retailers they feature you can visit their "recently added retailers" option.

Shopping experience
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If you already have a very clear idea which item you want to buy or which retailer you want to visit, you can use their own search engines. There are two separate ones, one for retailers in which you just type in the name of the shop you'd like to visit and will be presented within a second either with the result or the message that this retailer wasn't found.

For the product it is very much the same, type it in, for example "sunglasses" , press " go" and you'll find two pages of offers for sunglasses, including information at which shop you can find them, price and if cashback applies.
If you have an item you'd like to check further you can do so by clicking the "compare prices" button. This will lead you automatically to a page which lists all the items in a similar style that have been found.

If you would like to know first how much cashback you can expect from a shop before you check the items, I'd advise you to go through the categories.
Once you've found the category you are looking for, let's say you want to buy CD's where it would be "Entertainment", a drop-down menu will open from which you'll choose "music and instruments". Clicking on this will lead you straight to several pages of retailers from which you can choose from.

Once you've decided which retailer's online shop you'd like to visit you'll have to click "continue" which will lead you to another page on which you can find some more useful information about the retailer. For example how long it will take for the transaction to appear on your account (usually the next day) and roughly until when you'll be able to have the payment confirmed on your account. There is also a possibility to read how other users rate the retailer and if there is any problem in terms of payment or service this is the place where you will find out. Sometimes other users have promotional codes which they can leave here, so it pays to check before you click on.

If you should have forgotten to log on or your session has timed out you'll be reminded here to log in (again), which can be done by clicking a button which will lead you straight back to your retailer, so you won't have to go through the search again.

By clicking "continue" again you'll finally be taken to the retailer.

Anything for free ???
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Like the other rewards-sites they have the usual contenders for free pennies into your account, if you are willing to do some searches on a daily base through some search engines.
The ones featured at the moment are: Deal Time (£ 0.10), The Highstreet Web (£ 0.08), Kelkoo (£ 0.10), Car Source ( £ 0.04), Flightcomparison (£ 0.05), Devil Cards (£ 0.20).
Most of these have a limit of how many searches a day you can make, which limits your chances to make these a steady income immensely.

Apart from this they have a few pages full of "No purchase offers".
This can be websites which you can join like survey sites, competition sites (be aware that they'll bring you, apart from a few pennies into your account, masses of spam), free-trial offers, dating sites, newsletters and catalogues to sign up for (more spam and post),...

For the sake of the review I've tried to sign up everything on offer - apart from the gambling sites - to see if there is real money to be made.

This is what I've got :

- Hundreds of e-mails, mostly spam, on one day I've reached 69 mails

- A 30 day free credit check (not on offer on TCB any more) that told me that I am one of these boring persons who always pays their bills on time and has no larger sums, apart from the mortgage, on loan

- a 30 day free trial for Which? that came with a - very cheap - digital camera. The kids in my daughters school were over the moon to get a originally packed one for their raffle for the school-fete (they are reception class and don't watch out for the manufacturer names yet)

- many weeks of free DVD rental, as I've signed up for the trials one after the other

- lots of brochures for holidays

- some interesting offers through the dating sites - well, I am happily married, so not that interesting after all. Surprising yes, as I gave them as little information about me as possible and never hid the fact that I am married with children. If my husband ever reads this I'll have a lot of explaining to do !

- some more invitations for surveys than before - only the future will tell if I'll gain anything worthwhile mentioning from it

- all in all about £ 60 .-

Maybe I should mention here that it is advisable to keep a diary if you want to do the same, otherwise you might miss the date when to cancel your free trials and end up with a load of subscriptions you don't want.
Oh, and I've cancelled the dating sites and the competitions as soon as the payments were confirmed...

So was it worth it ? Hmm, not too sure here. If you really need money desperately it probably is, apart from that I'd say that you go through quite some hassle to get out of everything you've signed up for, as some companies make it as hard as possible for you to unsubscribe and the loads of e-mail loose their initial spark of interest very soon.
I also had to leave credit card details for some of the DVD-trials, which left me slightly nervous, but they all have been good and no money has been taken after cancelling very late throughout the trial periods.

Account
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So you've made your order and want to know if it has been registered by TCB and if the amount is fine. My experience with other reward-sites has taught me that some take weeks, if not months, to credit anything to your account, which is absolutely annoying in my book as I often forget after a few weeks and would have no control over if they credit me the right amount or if they do it at all.
Well, TCB are thankfully a bit more professional and you can see most transactions on your account within 24 hours. The longest I had to wait for one to appear so far was 2 days, which is still ok with me.

Every time you sign in your account will be shown automatically. The page is very easy to understand. The purchase summary is split up in pending credits ( most recent transactions that have been registered by TCB but haven't been confirmed by the retailer yet), confirmed, payable ( after the confirmation by the retailer you will have to wait until tTCB gets the money - only after that the amount will become payable to you), claimed and total.

Every retailer used by you can be clicked on to see the dates when the transactions have been made and how long it will approximately take until the amount becomes payable. These approximate dates seem to me not very reliable, as I had a few that either became payable long before the due date or had to be extended several times. Generally I'd say that it takes about 6 weeks but it really is down to the retailer and some are much faster or slower. If you take out insurances or book a holiday you'll have to wait until the first instalment is paid and the cooling off period is over or, for the holiday, until the holiday is paid in full.

Apart from checking your earnings, other options you have in your account summary are :

- Account details: You can check if your address details are right or change your password

- Test tracking : Some users had some technical problems due to which their purchases couldn't be tracked down. To see if your cookies are enabled they can make a test track for you and give you tips what to do, if there is a problem. If you have Norton Internet Security 2004 I'd recommend to disable the "Add block" while you are shopping at TCB.

- Payments : Shows you which payments have been made, when and with which method. This is also the place to request a payment. The amount which is payable to you at the moment, if any, will be visible and by clicking the "Please pay me" button you will be lead to a page where you can choose if you'd prefer the payment to be made into your pay-pal account or a paper cheque to be send to your home address. For pay-pal you'll have to give them your account details, for the cheque you'll have to confirm your address details.

- Enquiries: If you have an enquiry to TCB, no matter if for a missing transaction or whatever else comes to your mind, this is the place to contact them. There is no forum on the site, so this is the only possibility. I never had the need to contact them so far, as I never had a problem so cannot comment on how good their support is.

- Referrals and Links : Since a few weeks they offer the possibility to refer friends. You can do so through a link on this page by submitting the friends e-mail address or you can get yourself a link or banner or even a retailer link for your own website. If you wish you can print referral cards which show your own link to hand out to whoever might be interested.
For each referral you'll get £ 2.50 which will become payable to you once your friend has £2.50 in his account which have reached the payable status again.
They don't mind if you refer someone who belongs to your household, but each member must have their own e-mail address.
I've referred my husband to see if there really wouldn't be a problem with the same family name and address and it wasn't. I have received my cashback as confirmed by now and to reach the £ 5 he would need to cover the administration fee was done within half an hour by signing him up to some of the free offers like survey sites.
And before you are asking, NO I did NOT sign him up with the dating sites ...

- Sign-out

Now to the question of questions :

Do they pay and how long does it take ???
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When I had reached £ 30,70 in my account being stated as payable I decided that it was time to give it a go. I clicked the "Please pay me" button, decided to opt for a paper cheque, filled in my address details and submitted my request. Then I sat back and prepared myself for a long wait.
Well, it wasn't to be. After 2 days I had an envelope in my mail that contained a cheque over exactly £30.70. I took it to my bank and after a few days it was in my account. Impressed ? Well - comparing this with other sites - I was !

Just to be sure that I wasn't just lucky this time I waited a bit longer before writing this review and gave it another go. This time the amount I requested was £ 27.45 and I was really curious if they would live up to the standards they'd set with that first payment. I have to admit that this time it took a little bit longer - 3 days until the cheque arrived at my doorstep to be exact. I am still impressed !

So finally a rewards site that does not only pay but also does so very fast !

Signing up

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In case that I have made you interested enough to sign up to TCB I can assure you that it is very easy to do so. All you need to do is go to the site, click on "Sign up now" on the right hand corner on the top, enter your e-mail address and choose a password and of you go.
No need to fill in any personal details, you will only be asked your address when you request your first payment, no confirmation e-mail, it literally only takes a few seconds.

What is a real downside is, that they have introduced a yearly fee of £ 5.- which will be deducted from your earnings if you ask for a payment. For the signing up you'll get £2.50 straight back into your account. If you want to, you can collect your earnings over a longer period, even several years, and if you should ask for a payment after, let's say, 3 years, you won't be charged £15.- administration fee, but only £5.00.
This is clearly a down point for new members, members who signed up before the introduction of the administration fee - like me - are exempt from this. The chance to earn your £5.- straight back by recruiting two new members per year or just conducting enough free searches to avoid having it deducted from your actual cashback makes this still a website that is worth to give it a go if you are genuinely interested in spending money through them as their cashback rates are one of the best at the moment - with only Quidco.com to be a serious competition.

Other downsides ?
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The only other downside I could think about is, that your account will be automatically erased if you leave it dormant for more than 6 months. So even if you don't want to buy anything at the moment make sure to sign in regularly.

Ho do they compare to others ?
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TCB is so far the only rewards site that pays out 100 % of the cash they receive to their members, only rivalled by Quidco.com in that aspect, but they do also offer the possibility to conduct product searches for their own retailers and compare prices, which Quidco doesn't and which is a plus in my opinion.

Quidco also doesn't offer a referral scheme, which, if you know a lot of people to refer or have your own web-site, could prove quite lucrative.
That the both reward sites on the net that pay out 100 % still have different rates is not necessarily down to foul play on their behalf, but could be a result of some retailers paying more cashback if they receive a higher amount of orders through the rewards scheme.
Basically : the more orders are being submitted through TCB, the higher the chances that a retailer puts the percentage of cashback up - and, unfortunately , vice versa.
.
Some examples of how TCB compares :

Retailer Topcashback Quid com Rpoints
CDWow 6.5% 4 % 3%
Directline (up to) £ 73.75 £60.00 £37.50
Comet 4% 3.5% 1.5%
Monaco Gold £57 £15 £20
Value Flora 15.5% 15% 7.5%
Tesco com 2 % ot up to £12 3 % or up to £ 2%

Please note that these examples are correct at the time written and can change any time.

How do they stay alive ?
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As they give all the money that the retailers pay for your orders straight back to you, you might be wondering now what is in it for them.
Well, first of all of course the administration fee of £ 5 per year which can't sum up to much for them, as they give you straight half of it back to you as a signing-up bonus. Apart from that they'll pay you £2.50 for each referral you make, so this can't be it.
According to the information they give, they are making their money through advertisements. How does that go ?
Well, on every page you open you will find some links that relate to your search, which are in an orange framed box. These are non-cashback offers, which is clearly signed out.
By clicking on some of them from time to time you'll help them to make money, even if you don't buy from this retailer in the end. So if you are interested in signing up to TCB I'd advise you to do that from time to time to assure that they stay around. After all, it's only fair to keep them happy and affluent as the service they are giving so far still has to be beaten by someone else.

Conclusion
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I can highly recommend this site as not only the rates of cashback being paid to the members are highly competitive, but they also offer a wide range of retailers and up-to-date service for both, account and offers. The fact that they do not only pay out, which is, unfortunately, in this business not something to be taken for granted, but also do so extremely fast, makes this provider even more attractive for me.
Of course you won't get rich through TCB, but they can help you to save quite a bit on your shopping - in my case £170 since April - and that doesn't include the free stuff.

So what are you still doing here ? Go and have a look for yourself' it's

www.topcashback.co.uk

Some of the points below are not applicable as there is nothing to install or a forum for discussions, so please ignore the ratings

Thanks for reading this, Sandra  

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