Online shopping rewards

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The advent of online shopping has resulted in the development of a large number of rewards programs that offer rewards for shopping through specific shopping portals. These rewards can be points-based (allowing redemption for various prizes), cashback, airline frequent flyer-miles-based, hotel points, or even donations to charity.

Rewards portals exist in most major markets, most notably in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. The original loyalty program was started in 1896 by Sperry & Hutchinson called Green Stamps which has been digitized into the new S&H greenpoints.com. In the early 1900s, Carlson Marketing owned a company called Gold Stamps and that has similarly been rebranded as GoldPoints.com. One of the most successful programs that currently exist is called AirMiles out of Canada and, like the old Green/Gold Stamps programs it includes everyday spending in supermarkets.

It is important to remember that, with the exception of cashback rewards, each rewards program values its points differently: before consumers purchase through one of the point- or mile-based programs, they should compare the points they will earn with the specific reward they choose. In addition, because of the highly competitive nature of online commerce, many of the shopping portals offer coupons or discount offers not available if purchases are made directly through the merchant site: besides receiving points towards a reward, consumers can also save money up front.

To explain how cashback websites operate, you must be able to comprehend the idea that when someone clicks a link on the Internet from one website to another it is very easy to track where that click originated from. Millions of websites use this to their advantage by joining Affiliate programmes. For example, take a football fan website. As they are going to be getting visitors interested in football, theres a chance they might also be interested in gambling. Therefore that website owner might decide to place a banner for an online bookmaker on their football fan website. Then everytime a visitor clicks that banner and then goes on to become a paying customer at the bookmaker website, the football fan website owner will receive a commission - maybe %20, for example. What the cashback websites do is they gain commission for directing people to buy products/services via their website, and they might offer a high percentage of this commission back to the customers, say %80 for example thus keeping %20 of the commission money to themselves. In Quidco's case they offer %100 cashback but charge a yearly £5 fee.

One of the most established cashback websites and most popular is called Quidco. This website is accessible for most countries and boasts the fact that it pays out the highest rate of cashback available - offering %100 cashback. However the website deducts £5 from every members account as "administration costs" every year that the user earns commission. Another of the most popular cashback websites is called Rpoints. This is another well established website, and though it doesn't offer %100 cashback it does have a "highest cashback promise" in which it will match the rate of any cashback site that offers a higher rate, which obviously includes Quidco. Rpoints is probably more reliable then Quidco in my opinion, and there is also a very helpful and useful forum on the Rpoints website to help its users.