Quidco?

jetskidia

Whats it all about?
How does it work?

latecomer

Its a cash back site, you get money back for buying goods and services through them. There are a few others too. Read this:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/cashback-websites

trashcan_2

You don't get the money straight away because it takes about 3 months.
I received my first £40 last week off them.

jetskidia

How do you actually buy through them?

latecomer

You click on the link through to the retailer and Quidco/other cashback site track it. You then buy as normal. If you dont go via the cashback site then obviously you get nothing.

DocProc

Have a good read at MoneySavingExpert.com's own tips on cashback shopping. There is an absolute mine of information on what to do:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/cashback-sites-comparison/

A very important tip I'm going to give you, is to make sure the important cookies concerned are cleared out of your computer before you start to shop. If you don't do this, then the cashback tracking most certainly won't work properly.

Let's use Virgin Media as Merchant for a shopping example:

It's no good checking out stuff out with Virgin Media on VM's website (1) and then going into Quidco, linking back to VM (2) and placing your VM order. Doing it like this will not track properly as a Quidco introduction.

Why?

Well at visit (1) you picked up a VM cookie and this got left on your computer. It was still there at visit (2) and so VM's in-house cookie technology would be able to tell your VM visit number (2) wasn't through a Quidco introduction.

So..... to deal with this, you delete perhaps ALL your cookies or definitely ALL of the Virgin Media cookies, before you actually start to shop with Virgin Media and definitely before you access Virgin Media through the Quidco introductory link.

I use a special program called CCleaner to help me do this. With this program I find it easy to be selective and find the pertinent cookies much more easily. However, you don't really need a program like CCleaner to do this. You can find and delete the cookies sorta kinda generically, using your Internet Explorer browser's Tool Bar at Tools, Internet Options, General Tab - see the Browsing History section. Here you can find all the cookies and delete them quite easily. In fact you can delete everything in your browser's Temporary Internet Files here quite easily and safely before you actually do your Internet shopping

Right. Having deleted the Virgin Media cookies, you are now a 'Virgin Media shopping virgin'. Well at least you are from a 'VM cookie view point' and so when you now go to VM though Quidco it will show up as a clean Quidco introduction track.

So the best way to cashback shop, is to first find the best merchant, then delete that merchant's cookies, then enter Quidco, then link to the Merchant through Quidco, then do your shopping.

The MSE site above shows you how to polish this procedure up even more. It does this primarily by helping you find out who the best cashback payer might be for a particular merchant. Quidco's isn't always the highest commission.

Importantly though, do get rid of those cookies! This way, you should be a lot more certain of the shopping transaction tracking cleanly and then getting your cashback introduction paid.

Good Luck!

(Some of those retailers out there pay quite a lot of cashback. eg, Marks and Spencers pay up to 8% (depending on what you are buying from them) as a Quidco cashback introduction)

DocProc

By the way, a VirginMedia cookie looks like a little block of text such as

www.allyoursvirginmedia.com
www.virginmedia.com
virginmedia.com

RoyBoy_2

A simple way to avoid mis-tracking of visits is to use two different browers. I use Firefox as my main browser to search and find the deals, then I fire up internet explorer, clear the cookie cache (which is seperate to Firefox's) and then go through Quidco to the merchant.

This means I do not lose all my Firefox cookies and so can keep my logins, etc. while the merchants see me as a fresh user with internet explorer.

It works the same the other way if you prefer internet explorer as your main browser.

DocProc

Good idea that - using a different browser to shop with.

That's why I use CCleaner. This program makes cookies very easy to see and very easy to move about from one of two columns - a 'keep cookies' column and a 'delete cookies' column.

This way, when you 'housekeep' and clear out all of the junk files, you can keep some of the more important stuff, being the sort of stuff that is needed to avoid you having to re-enter usernames and passwords, etc, etc.

jem16

RoyBoy wrote: »

A simple way to avoid mis-tracking of visits is to use two different browers. I use Firefox as my main browser to search and find the deals, then I fire up internet explorer, clear the cookie cache (which is seperate to Firefox's) and then go through Quidco to the merchant.

This means I do not lose all my Firefox cookies and so can keep my logins, etc. while the merchants see me as a fresh user with internet explorer.

It works the same the other way if you prefer internet explorer as your main browser.

That's what I do and only had one item not track(that was because the MoreThan website was playing up) through Quidco since I started doing this.

abr

be very aware of quidco
i have used them about six times the first one for my car insurance in 2007 with lstb
they were advertising i think it was £125 cashback...well it never tracked:mad:
during the course of the year i used them again a few more times but only to buy smaller items
only one of those deals tracked that was from play.com and was for a total of 54p
i've been told that quidco do not pay out such small amounts so over the year of 2007
the score was me = 0 quidco = 6

and like some of the other people i too used another browser just for quidco and made sure cookies was cleared