Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Earn money for shopping!
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is a sponsored post for Quidco
Earn money for shopping!
Earning money for shopping that you’re doing anyway sounds like a dream come true, so I was very keen to check out Quidco, which claims to allow you to do just that.
- Quidco: Save up a cash pot while shopping
- Do your normal shopping via Quidco
- Easy to shop your favourite brands
- Earning cashback
- My shopping experience
- What I saved
QUIDCO: SAVE UP A CASH POT WHILE SHOPPING
Essentially Quidco is a service that rewards you commission as cashback on brands used via the service. If you use the service throughout the year, the average amount of cashback earned is £300.
DO YOUR NORMAL SHOPPING VIA QUIDCO
It’s really easy to use as well: you just browse or search Quidco for cashback rates, discounts and vouchers, and then withdraw your earnings to PayPal, make a direct bank transfer, or choose from a range of gift card options for you or someone else. So there are lots of options, which I appreciated.
EASY TO SHOP YOUR FAVOURITE BRANDS
So what brands can I buy through Quidco to get my free cash rewards?
Again, I was pleasantly surprised that there are literally THOUSANDS of brands, many of which I already buy but also tons of other suggestions to get me clicking away. Amazon (which I use a lot), Argos, eBay and Just Eat are but a few of these brands. There are a lot of categories so I’d be surprised if you can’t find anything you’re interested in: Lego, Disney, M&S, Microsoft, Dominos, even British Gas… really, hardly any company isn’t on the list. And those small percentage commissions really mount up over the course of several months.
EARNING CASHBACK
To keep you using Quidco, they’ll also price match products you find, and add an extra cashback on any other UK cashback site. Each brand takes a slightly different amount of time to pay out your cashback, so it pays to be patient and store up your cashback over time, so that you can really appreciate them when they’re nicely stocked up.
Once you get into it, and start shopping through Quidco with the brands you use or want to use, it’s actually quite fun building them up, and deeply satisfying when the money starts piling up!
MY SHOPPING EXPERIENCE
I had a laundry list of shopping to buy when I started using Quidco, and I was pleasantly surprised that not only was I able to save money while buying what I wanted anyway – some gifts, some things for myself, some supplies – but that Quidco also had some great brands to search that I hadn’t necessarily considered.
I wanted already to buy from brands like Lego and B&Q – I also did a Sainsbury’s food shop, as they’re offering £10 or more cashback for new customer Click & Collect orders – but I was also tempted to wander a little from my usual brands and try out Currys and Zavvi for some electrical goods and films on blu-ray (bit of a personal weakness) but found some great bargains, and of course banked some more cashback for the future.
WHAT I SAVED
Currys give 20% cashback on select items, and though some were tempting (cameras for example), the laptop I actually wanted was £800, and Currys offered a 4% cashback reward on that, which netted me £32 from this purchase alone. So on that occasion, buying a larger item bagged me a better reward; but equally I was able to get 2% cashback on a new Amazon Alexa, which was £30, so £6. You can see how it all adds up!
The best technique I found was to make sure you have a definite shopping list before you start, with your preferred budget, then check out what offers and discounts each brand is offering and see if it fits within your plan.
Some brands, like Disney for example, don’t offer the highest commissions (2% currently) but all in all, I can recommend Quidco if you enjoy online shopping and also have an eye for a bargain, while putting something aside for the future. It makes sense – in fact I don’t see why you wouldn’t use Quidco for all future shopping. I certainly will be.
*all cashback rates were correct at the time of writing
Disclaimer: MoneyMagpie is not a licensed financial advisor and therefore information found here including opinions, commentary, suggestions or strategies are for informational, entertainment or educational purposes only. This should not be considered as financial advice. Anyone thinking of investing should conduct their own due diligence.
I’m planning on a big Lego purchase for my kiddo soon…I’ll be using this!
I use all kinds of cashback apps already so I’ll try and use Quidco as well. Think I was signed up a few years ago but for some reason haven’t used it for a while.
Just had a quick look through their brands and I’m quite impressed… always been a bit sceptical of cashback sites being worth the effort, but I’ll give it a try.
I was exactly the same! I have earnt £120 since last August though – don’t know if that says more about my online shopping habit mind!
I love the sound of this. With everything going up in price, we need more tools like this to help us out.