Martyn asks: “I see on Moneystepper that you recommend using cashback sites like Quidco, but I’m not sure how they work? Do they charge me a fee for my cashback? How do they make money?”
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Question 22 – How Does Quidco Work? – Shownotes
Today’s question comes from Martyn:
I see on Moneystepper that you recommend using cashback sites like Quidco, but I’m not sure how they work? Do they charge me a fee for my cashback? How do they make money?
Good question Martyn.
Quidco is a service that we love here at Moneystepper, and we’ve written a full article on it in the past:
Related Article: Quidco Review
What Is Quidco?
The very brief overview is that after setting up a free Quidco account, before you spend money online, you go to Quidco and click on their link to the site. Then, depending on the site and the purchase, that retailer will pay Quidco “cashback” for your purchase, which Quidco then pays to you (less a small fee that they take which you’ll never see).
Therefore, for all your usual spending, by visiting Quidco first you can earn cashback – and some serious cashback at that.
Since I started using Quidco (and remember that I’m really not a heavy spender online), I’ve earned £1,484.81 in cashback:
My latest purchase for instance was for annual breakdown cover with relay assistance, which usually costs £69.99 with RAC, which I earned a whopping £40 cashback on:
Quidco – A Huge Affiliate
To answer your question of how Quidco operates and how they make money, it’s important to appreciate how affiliates work. Effectively, the retailer is willing to pay another company a certain percentage of the sale as a referral fee. So, with my RAC purchase, RAC have agreed to pay Quidco £40 for Quidco passing the customer onto RAC.
Quidco then make money in two ways:
- They may actually be getting £41 cashback for that purchase, but they only agree to pay you the figure of £40. This extra £1 is then Quidco’s profit. However, this “fee” never comes out of the amount that you are expecting, as Quidco will only ever advertise the cashback as being for £40.
- There is also a “premium service” that you can use for £5 a year which guarantees quicker payments of your cashback.
The business model is that they are very high volume and low margin (the £1 example may even less in reality). It’s always good to check out what other offers are available, but in the vast majority of cases, I’ve struggled to beat the cashback rates offered by Quidco.
For example, with that RAC purchase, it’s effectively a 57% discount on my purchase – not too bad at all.
If you want to sign up for Quidco, and support Moneystepper when doing so, you’ll find a link to Quidco below, where we receive a whopping £2.50 for every sign-up that goes through that link. Our very own affiliate link in fact:
Ask Your Question
This show runs three times a week and answers all of your personal finance questions. If you have any questions, please don’t be shy to ask. You can ask in three ways:
- Leave a comment on any of the Q&A podcast shownotes (including this one)
- Email me at moneystepper@gmail.com
- Leave a message on the Speakpipe App which you will find below and on our “submit a question” page:
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