Freeeeeee money! (Quidco.co.uk)

Member Name: scarletcanary

Product:	Quidco.co.uk
Date:	04/10/09 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No flashing banner ads, 100% cashback

Disadvantages: Lack of care for customers, annual charge

Quidco is a cashback site.
For those who don't know, this is basically a advert site, but instead of the site owners taking money from you clicking through to the advertised site is is paid to you directly.

This is usually in the form of a percentage, and on Quidco this varies between 1% of your purchase amount, and 50%. (so if you spent £100 you could get anywhere between £1 and £50).

This money is kept track of in your personal account page, and goes through several stages:

Tracked- this means that the site has reported your purchase.

Validated- this means that the site has completed it's fraud checks and will pay out when they send money to Quidco.

Recieved- this is when the money has been actually recieved by Quidco, and is ready to pay.


You may notice I mentioned fraud checks above- this is when the retailer suspects that you are trying to get money out of them twice- this doesn't always mean that you have tried, but if you have clicked through to a site another way then you can sometimes have your cashback declined, or not track for this reason.
It is very important that you clear your cookies regularly.

If possible it may be helpful to install a seperate browser just for cashback (it should be noted that some browsers appear to share cookies, such as AOL and Internet Explorer, but you should be fine with Safari, Firefox, or Google Chrome)

Sometimes a site will just decline or not track purchases at all which can be very fustrating, especially if it was a paid for purchase, and this is why cashback should always be treated as a nice little extra, and not a guaranteed thing.

As well as getting money back for shopping on sites, Quidco offers a number of free deals, (such as getting paid to signup for newsletters etc.) and I would say that probably half of my £500 cashback have come from free offers. These offers often don't last long, so if you see them then grab them!

Payment is by Paypal or BACS (direct bank transfer) and this happens at the beginning of the month.
BACS is free, but paypal will incur a 20p + 3.2% charge, but you can set your own payment limit (so if you don't want to be paid only for paypal to swallow half of it you can set a high limit.)

_____My personal experience and unique features________

All of the above is pretty standard for a cashback site, so here I will talk about the unique features of Quidco.

Quidco requires a annual mambership fee of £5. This is not paid upfront however but is the first £5 you earn a year.
This is running costs of the website, since Quidco pays 100% of any cashback they recieve.
This is pretty good but it can be beaten by a few other sites (topcashback- review coming once I've fully experienced that site!)
The main reason that it is worth paying this admin fee as opposed to a free 100% cashback site is that it doesn't have any annoying flashing ads that you don't get paid for.

My personal experience has been that while I was happy to pay for what I considered good service, and a "co-operative" as it was advertised, I no longer feel that they are listening to their members, and the claims of co-operative is a screen for what is a fairly lucrative business.
This opinion is based on aesthetic site changes, which while they were overwhelmingly unpopular, are still in place with no apology or explaination from the Quidco team.

However, these are just my opinions, as I have said I have made a lot of money in two years- I just wouldn't reccommend them over the alternatives.

Summary: I'd go elsewhere, in fact I have!