Of the various cashback sites available, there are two front runners out there for the UK: Quidco and TopCashback. My personal preference is TopCashback purely from a point of view of the amount of cashback received, the payout opportunities, etc. I do have both though to make sure I can always get the best cashback deal. Between them, they count over 11 million members but I still meet many friends, family and others who have not heard of them or know of them but think its too difficult to get the cashback. This couldn’t be further from the truth and I must admit that since becoming a member of the site over 9 years ago, I always relish the opportunity of getting cashback on my every day purchases. Here’s a few helpful tips and points:
- Sign Up – you’ve got to be in it to win it, or in the case of cashback, to cash in. The process to signup is dead easy, access the TopCashback site and enter the signup information and you’re done. It will automatically give you a 30 day free trial of their Plus membership (see point 2 below to help you decide whether you want to keep the Plus membership or not).
- Plus Membership – Topcashback is FREE but they have a Plus membership tier, which costs £5 a year and gives you a number of additional benefits such as 105% of the cashback rather than the standard 101%, more payout methods and a higher referral payment. It’s up to you whether to keep the Plus membership (it will take the £5 out of any payout so unless you earn over £5 you won’t be charged it) or go with the Free membership. The rule of thumb being if you are going to get more than £100 cashback a year (that’s dead easy to do and the average yearly cashback earned by Plus members is actually £356), it pays to go with the Plus Membership.
- Install TopCashback Toolbar – some people will say that they often forget to click through the relevant merchant link on TopCashback and therefore receive the cashback for their purchases. For these forgetful people, TopCashback has a handy toolbar you can download that will flash up when you are on a merchant which offers cashback and you can then click through to make sure you don’t miss out. Its ever so handy if you are not yet used to starting any online shopping trip at Topcashback. Trust me I am 🙂
- Payout Methods – now most people will just want the money, and thats easily paid by BACS (directly into your bank) or by PayPal. However, it is possible to get the cashback paid as a number of other payout methods including Amazon, M&S, Avios, Love2Shop, Argos, Debenhams, etc. The beauty with these payouts is that you get up to an extra 10% bonus (depending on which store the vouchers are for). So for example if you have £10 cashback payable, you might decide to be paid £10 into your bank account, but you might go for Debenhams vouchers and get £10.80. Not bad hey.
- FREE Cashback – now of course it makes sense that you receive cashback for purchases. So you buy something from M&S and you get a percentage of the spend back. But heres the beauty of cashback. You can actually get cashback for not actually spending any money. Wow!! For example its coming up to the renewal time for your car insurance and you are looking for the best price. We all love a good quote on Confused.com. But did you realise you can get £2.41 just for doing a quote. Before you rush off and start getting quotes for all your mates, there is a limit so please stick to the rules as you don’t want your membership to be cancelled.
- InStore Cashback – so you’ve got your online shopping covered. Great. But it doesn’t stop here. By registering your card with their OnCard cashback service, you can actually receive cashback on in store purchases. There aren’t a massive amount of stores offering this and you do have to use a MasterCard for most, if not all of them, but 6% cashback on Staples, 5% on The Body Shop and 10% back on American Eagle Outfitters is not bad now is it.
So there are my main pointers on TopCashback. Hope you find them useful and happy cashbacking.