Cashback: The Definitive Guide

How I Made $711 by Buying Things Online.

Cashback sites will revolutionise the way you shop

Tom Ford
4 min readMay 25, 2020
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

The Discovery

I first discovered a cashback site back in 2018. As a student, I was intrigued; every penny counts. I started using the site for all of my online purchases, including insurance, eBay purchases and train tickets.

2 years later, I have made £585 ($711), simply by buying things online. Here’s how you can do the same.

Credit: The author’s cashback account

What is a Cashback Site?

A cashback site, at its simplest, is a collection of web links to various online shops.

When you use these links to arrive at an online shop and make a purchase, you get cashback credited to your cashback account.

Different online shops offer different cashback rates. For example, clothing stores often pay a high percentage of your purchase as cashback (sometimes as high as 50%). Amazon and eBay pay much less (usually 1–10%). Financial products like insurance or savings accounts often pay out a large single cash sum, often over $100, rather than a percentage cut.

How do Cashback sites make money?

Cashback sites take advantage of affiliate links to make money, similar to how influencers make money from advertising.

Online shops pay the cashback site for the privilege of directing you, the customer, to their store.

The cashback site makes it worthwhile for you to click through their links (rather than use a search engine), by paying you cashback.

How do you earn Cashback?

Once you have signed up to a cashback site, its simple to earn.

For example, if you want to make get cashback from a purchase on a webstore:

  1. Visit a cashback site.
  2. Search for the webstore in the search bar.
  3. Click on the link to the webstore

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Tom Ford

Finance, Tech and Productivity. Studying Economics & Management at Oxford University. Building a UK Student Loan Repayment App: www.studentcalc.co.uk