Slow way to get vouchers (toluna-group.com)

Member Name: sun-is-shining

Product:	toluna-group.com
Date:	26/10/09 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: it's free to join

Disadvantages: slow

As a student I'm always on the look-out how to make some extra money and survey websites proved to be a good investment. I'm member of Surveyhead and Lightspeedpanel and Toluna is the latest of the sites that I joined - but I guess that it's going to be the first that I leave if things don't change.

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What is it?

Toluna offers all its members the possibility to take part in online surveys about different products and to get paid for this.

All you need to do to earn some money is to set up an account and answer all surveys that are available to you. Minisurveys on the website pay as well but don't expect to get rich just by answering these quick votes.
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How to sign up?

Signing up is very easy and you'll get a bonus of 500 points - sounds nice but is in the end something like 10pence. However you'll get many points for filling out your profile and answering surveys about yourself and your habits. There are around 15 mini surveys and they al pay 300 points plus a 2000 points bonus if you answer all of them. The topics are things like "car" "mobile phone" "hobbies" etc.
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How to earn money?

There are many ways - too many and too confusing if you ask me - how to make money on Toluna. The easiest is by filling out your profile and getting points for these mini surveys about yourself.

Then you can answer quick votes on the website which pay 15points for 1 click - these are similar to the quick matches on lightspeedpanel.

Then there are quick surveys which pay between 60 and 150 points for a few questions - some invite you to take part in bigger surveys in the end.

As all survey websites they'll also send you invitations to take part in surveys via e-mail. I usually get 1 or 2 per week so you can imagine how long it takes to earn enough points to redeem a reward.

Surveys can be about all sorts of products, so far I answered questions about mobile phones, movies, student living and travel. These questionnaires can be quite interesting but get repetitive after a while, particularly with mobile phones it seems as the send me the same survey over and over again.

They vary in length and reward, but the invitation e-mail tells you in advance what you can expect. Most surveys take between 10 and 20min and you'll receive between 3000 and 6000 Toluna points - so between 30p and 1 pound roughly.

You can say that 5000 Toluna points are 1 pound - that always depends on which voucher you chose.

It happened several times that I answered a survey but never got any points for it - always mark which surveys you actually answer and contact the customer support if you are missing some points.
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How to redeem your rewards?

There are 3 ways to redeem your rewards.

- Convert 1500 points into one prize draw tickets for the £ 5000 "Incredible Monthly Prize Draw" - why would anyone wants to do that? Spending ages answering quick votes for 1 entry in a prize draw? You'll get 50 entries for answering a 3min survey on lightspeedpanel.com

- Convert 3000 to 10000 points into discount vouchers for several brands. That might be useful if you plan on buying something big but apart from that I think it's not very useful. They are not well known brands or shops but rather unknown websites and Spa offers.

- Convert 60000 points in 10 to 12 pound vouchers for Amazon, Love2shop and Debenhams. That's the option I chose as I can never have enough Amazon vouchers. Unfortunately it took me almost 4 months to receive enough points to claim my voucher plus 2 months waiting for the voucher to arrive.

The biggest minus point for me is that there is no option to redeem cash by using PayPal or something similar. The Amazon Vouchers are for me the best option so far.
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Problems

Unfortunately I had to contact the help point several times so far; many times because I answered one of the big surveys but never got any points for that and lately because I waited over 2 months for my voucher. I just don't understand why they cannot send amazon vouchers via e-mail.

The customer support was always very friendly but to be honest not too helpful; standard answers like "we are working on that problem" are very common.
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I'm going to keep my Toluna account, purely because I have a lot of free time and free Internet in my flat, so it doesn't really matter how long it's going to take to get the points for the next voucher. But I have to say that from all the survey websites I'm taking part in Toluna is my least favourite.

Summary: see review