You may be familiar with cashback sites? It’s effectively a different form of advertising – instead of trying to lure you in with fancy campaigns, companies offer a discount via an intermediary. You shop through them and save some cash, they get the customers, everyone’s a winner. Unless you’re using Tickbox Cashback.
Quidco - one of the good ones
First, let me stress that I’ve been using sites like TopCashback and Quidco for years. I’ve saved an awful lot of money through careful shopping and using these sites to buy home insurance, travel insurance, set up a mobile phone contract and purchase various things for birthdays and Christmas – everything from books to DVDs to cat toys. I’ve saved over £2,500 so far. So this post is certainly not to call out cashback sites.
I’d even used Tickbox Cashback previously for smaller transactions without issue and they’d been good. Not hugely speedy but not bad.
Last year, they were offering a great deal. £100 per pet insurance policy with More Than. I’d just rehomed two new cats and really wanted all six of my animals to be with the same insurer. I weighed it up and checked the policies and decided that it would be a good deal. It wouldn’t save me a great deal of money but it would be good to have all my pets with one provider and the cashback would be a good boost. Rescue cats are rewarding but we’ve rehomed six and it doesn’t come cheap.
This was in August. I’ve paid my premiums dutifully since then. Have I seen a penny from Tickbox Cashback? Well… I followed up in December and was told the transaction would be validated in January. I also pointed out that for each policy it was only showing £20 (the standard rate) and not the offer amount of £100. I then followed up in January. Two week’s later they closed my ticket as ‘resolved’ without an update. I reopened it…. Nothing. In March, I requested an update once again. I was asked to provide the policy numbers for every policy, which I did. Again, I had pointed out that it should be £100 per policy, not £20.
Finally, this week I received an update: “After looking into this transaction we have now validated the cashback and it has been added to your account balance.”
Fail? Epic fail! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Well, hooray! Except – you guessed it – not quite. They had only validated the transaction at £20 and only one of them. So… where’s the other £580? It’s taken me 8 months to get £20 cashback (and only ‘validated’, not paid), so I estimate that I should get the additional £580 in… ooh… around 20 years?
Quidco and TopCashback have managed to pay me four times as much without any drama… I guess that tells me who I’ll be using in future.