How Does Cashrewards work?

witsa on 29/12/2019 - 11:38

In the last couple of years, there's been a few websites like shopback and cashrewards that have sprung up, which seem quite closely aligned to ozbargain community.

Does anyone know the history of how they came to be? How does it work? What is their business model? Do they just make deals with all these retailers?

Cause it seems whilst the deals are good, the technology seems pretty terrible.

I'm guessing it uses a 3rd party cookie to verify you've gone to the site via the cashrewards link. This makes for some pretty bad user experience - users have no real idea whether the cookie worked - or if it was blocked by adblockers or just wasn't "clicked" properly.

It seems cashrewards isn't even integrated into the retailer's website at all. The discount doesn't show at the checkout, or even on invoices. The process requires going to an external site to go back to the retailer's site so the retailer never advertises it.

I don't understand why retailers would even opt into this. It's almost like Cashreward is exploiting some sort of loophole? Like if a retailer really wanted to offer a discount, why use cashrewards? Wouldn't it be much easier to track or promote if they just offered discount codes through their own websites?

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Comments

  • No Username on 29/12/2019 - 11:50
    -3

    Don't they make money off selling user data. Like user buying habits and then selling it off to market research companies?

  • Melb69 on 29/12/2019 - 11:50

    Google and YouTube vids for you to watch over the summer break. Then come back and post your update.

  • Hellfire on 29/12/2019 - 12:51
    +2

    They are using affiliate marketing and split the commission with the customer.

  • Ughhh on 29/12/2019 - 13:09

    It seems cashrewards isn't even integrated into the retailer's website at all. The discount doesn't show at the checkout, or even on invoices.

    Then that wouldn't be a 'cashback'…

  • Clear on 29/12/2019 - 20:03
    +4

    Cashrewards and all other cashback sites are using something called affiliate marketing which is a massive massive industry found all over the internet.

    The gist of it is that stores will use an affiliate network to generate traffic and income to their website. Affiliates like Cashrewards will put a unique URL on their website that when clicked on generates a cookie to track your purchase. When the purchase is successfully tracked and confirmed, Cashrewards will get commission based on how much you spent and they will give you a portion of that back.

    Not all affiliate networks use cookies though. Conversion pixels and postback URLs are commonly used as well (Google it). It's why cashback companies insist you have adblock and other addins or similar software disabled as they have the potential to block the tracking.

    Cashback companies are a very small part of affiliate marketing anyway. Nearly all review sites, comparison sites, price history sites, YouTube reviewers, influencers etc etc. all have affiliate network links in their content, so they can make some money off you. Reading an article about the top 10 laptops of 2019? I bet every single link to Amazon is an affiliate link. The difference is you don't see a single cent of any of it.

    Even OzBargain dishes out affiliate links on all their deals for guests and signed out users. It contributes to paying the staff and keeping the website going.

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