Quidco is a cashback website

Cashback website

A cashback website is a type of reward website that pays its members a percentage of money earned when they purchase goods and services via its affiliate links.-Cashback shopping:...

 based in the UK, with offices in Sheffield and London. The site takes the commission (termed 'cashback') usually paid by retailers to third-party referrers and passes it on to Quidco members, apart from the first £5 which is retained each year in order to fund the running of Quidco.

History

Paul and Jennifer Nikkel co-founded Quidco whilst studying at the University of Sheffield in 2005 as a way of saving students money as they shopped online. The website launched in Sheffield in May 2005, with the London office opening in 2007. By 2009, Quidco had 700,000 members. As of October 2011 Quidco had 1.6 million members. The company's accounts to 31/7/2010 showed a pre-tax profit of £943,413 on a turnover of £32,077,869

Business model

Retailers have a certain marketing budget that they are prepared to spend to attract a sale; Quidco cashback is essentially the retailer paying that budget as cashback to the customer. John Stevens in the Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

 explains:
Quidco uses affiliate networks in order to track transactions with retailers and to allot the cashback to the correct Quidco member. Logged-in Quidco members get cashback on their purchases when they click from Quidco to a retailer's site and carry out a transaction; the amount of cashback available can either be a fixed sum or a percentage of the order value. In June 2011, Which?

Which?

Which? is a product-testing and consumer campaigning charity with a magazine, website and various other services run by Which? Ltd ....

 published an article claiming that debt-management companies were targeting Quidco customers.

Egg Cash Back Store

The Egg Cash Back Store was launched in June 2010 by Egg Banking and Quidco, offering Egg Card holders membership of a co-branded Quidco website.

iPhone app

Quidco's iPhone app was released on the 1st of June 2011 in the iTunes Store. The app offers cashback, voucher code and a UK first of paying individuals to 'check-in' to retailer outlets and received 'Consumer app of the week' from the Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

and 'App of the day' from Pocketlint.com.

Payments

Quidco members can receive cashback either through a BACS transfer into their bank account or via PayPal. Quidco issues payments twice a month; payments are sent on the first working days following the 1st and 15th day of the month. The minimum payment amount is £1.01; if the amount of received cashback is less than this, the payment will roll over until the next payment date where the due amount is £1.01 or greater.

Payment times

The payment time for cashback can vary from retailer to retailer, depending on the speed at which they process and validate transactions and send on payments.