What is a Cashback Site?

A cashback site is primarily a site that you can earn money on when you buy things online. 

However, this isn’t ALL that cashback sites are about these days.  Many of them have things that you can do daily to earn money such as searches on various search engines, getting quotes for insurance, and other things of this nature.  These tend not to earn you huge amounts, but as they cost you nothing to do, they are often the best way to build up your money on a cashback site.

When you shop online and use a cashback site, you will earn an amount - often a percentage - based on what you spend.  So if for example the cashback site is offering 4% cashback at a site, and you spend £10 there, you’d get 40p paid into your cashback site.  The way this works, is that before you make your purchases, you go to the cashback site, sign in, and then you click through their link to take you to the site where you want to shop.  The cashback site makes it’s money in one of two ways.  Either, it earns a percentage for every person who clicks through the link, so if they earn an overall 5% they might be giving you four fifths of that and keeping one fifth for themselves - so they’d make 10p and you’d make 40p.  The other way that some sites do this, is that they give you 100% of the cashback, but they charge you a fee each year that’s taken out of the money that you make, so that the first £5 or £10 that you make each year they take as their fee, but then from that point on, you get everything - so your £50 spend would earn you the full 5% and you’d get 50p. 

Most people who want to make some money online will sign up to several cashback sites.  The reason for this is that not all of them offer the same affiliate links so while one might offer cashback on Amazon for example another might not, but that second one might be offering cashback when you spend money at Ebay which the first one doesn’t.  Also, sometimes sites will offer different percentages so having a number of sites that you’re a member of means you can choose the best one for you when you are shopping somewhere. 

With so many cashback sites around it’s hard to know who offers the best rate of cashback for each different shop or product, so it can be very useful to use a comparisson site such as Smart Cashback where you can put in the details of the retailer you want to shop with, and they will compare all the various cashback sites and tell you who is offering what so that you can easily see which one is going to offer you the best return.