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Cashback sites are exactly what they sound like, You get cashback for going through their website when you buy something online, the way it works is a company will be approached by a cashback site and they may say that they have 250,000 members and would the company be interested in working with them to introduce new customers to their company, by way of offering a cashback deal, this is a lot more cost effective them actually leafleting the whole of the UK to get maybe 20,000 new customers or doing TV ads at £50,000 each, as they are actually getting traffic directly to their website, and then they hope the new customers will tell their friends about the deal, and it will snowball.
For example an online cashback site is offering £130 cashback if you sign up to a Vodafone 18 month mobile phone contract, no catches, no loop holes, obviously the mobile phone industry has very high profit margins, so they can offer these fantastic deals without batting an eyelid, as they will probably make twice that amount in profit from your 18 month contract,
as I recently got a sim only contract from O2 for £5 per month for 420mins, 1000 texts, but more about that later in the site,
Cashback sites also do a lot of business with most of the online retailers, mainly via a percentage of your purchase refunded via cashback, there is a lot of car insurance companies that deal with cashback sites (there are regular deals between £70 to £100 per new policy), this is really competitive, and they regularly increase their cashback to entice new customers, also there are online bookies that offer "free bets" "bet matching" or just Cashback, a good one I recently did was Coral and I earn't £35 cashback on a £10 bet,
(I had to bet £10 to be eligible to earn the cashback there is a chance you could loose the money but you still come out with a minimum of £25 profit), I didn't loose I won so I got my £10 bet back plus £2.50 winnings so I made £37.50, and they also matched the £10 bet I put on so I still have £10 to spend when I find another "sure bet" horse.
But you don't even have to buy anything online, cashback sites offer "free money", by either "daily clicks" or signing up to free trials, and they will pay you for trying their service, a good example is "Lovefilm.com", they always have loads of ads on TV, they are offering £20 cashback for signing up to a 2 week free trial, all you do is cancel it 5 days before the end of the 2 weeks, make sure all your disks have been sent back, and get proof of postage, which is free, phone them up and cancel it, the number is an 0800 number, what they hope is that you love the service so much you will want to stay, and this is where they will earn the profit from you.
"Daily clicks"
What are daily clicks?,
This is quite a difficult one to explain, daily clicks are quite small amounts of money that "shop bots" or price comparison sites, PAY YOU for using them, this works because when you do a search for a item on a comparison site like Kelkoo,
(see online shopping page)
and you click through to a site like John Lewis, even if you don't buy anything Kelkoo will charge John Lewis about 20 pence, even more if you actually buy something, normally a percentage of the sale, then they will give you part of this money, there are people that do nothing other than "daily clicks" all day, every day, and can earn 1000's of £'s, they do tend to limit you to 2 searches per day per comparison site, but there are no limits to how many cashback sites you can join, if you are interested in free money this is an excellent site to start with as it lists all the sites that are worth doing and how much you can earn per day from them.
http://www.click-your-way2cash.co.uk/more-sites-for-the--established-clicker-.htm
I only do 2 "daily click" sites one is TopCashBack and the slightly better one is Quidco, I only do these 2 as there is no cash out limit (normally it's between £10 to £20 which could take up to 2 to 3 months to reach when you are only earning between 10p to 20p per day), it also takes up a lot of time and you may only earn £5 per month from each site, I have found that doing free trials and joining bookies is so much easier and so much more lucrative, check out my Quidco balance in the photo's below.
Quidco is the cashback site I prefer, although they do take a yearly admin fee of £5, I think that they do have the better offers and do have better tracking, so far it hasn't let me down, now if you have a problem with something tracking they do have a better system for submitting queries,
before you start using cashback sites you have to set your browser up so it will track your purchases,
You will need to enable cookies, this is how purchases are tracked,
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+
Select "Internet Options" from the Tools menu.
Click on the "Privacy" tab.
Click the "Default" button (or manually slide the bar down to "Medium") under "Settings".
Click "OK".
Close all open browser windows, then re-open and sign-in.
Mozilla Firefox 2
Go to the "Tools" menu.
Select "Options".
Select the "Privacy" icon tab along the top.
Tick the box "accept cookies from sites"
Click "OK" to save changes.
Close all open browser windows, then re-open and sign-in.
If you do decide to use cashback sites as a way of reducing the amount you pay for things, you do need to make sure when you click through to the retailers website, you must go through Quidco or Topcashback's website, and you must make sure that the only cookie in your browser is the Quidco one, before clicking on the link to the retailer, if you don't do this there is a good chance that it won't track, you won't get paid someone else may be paid instead of you, don't forget though that cashback is not guaranteed, so always go for the cheapest then if there is cashback available it's a bonus.
The image above has had my user name removed for security reasons, but it says £310.29, and most of that has been earned in the last 2 months, and all of it is "FREE MONEY".
Above is a image of the monthly breakdown of earnings on my quidco account, when this picture was taken we were only up to the 10th of July, July is showing as £146.94.