Quidco Question and Answers

batvink

It's time to take responsibility

Just opening this one up for debate, as I see some slightly worrying scenarios in the way untracked transactions are essentially responded to with "que sera sera".

It wast lastminute.com that got me thinking, and starting to put some hypothetical figures to this.

Lets say a conservative, average transaction is £300, not unreasonable for hotel bookings. 2 nights for 2 people in London midweek is about £300-£500 when you remove the extremeties (up to £800). Many people book more nights and include theatre tickets, restaurants and so forth.

Lets work with 100 people using Quidco to book through lastminute.com each month (Remember there are 4 million Quidco members! 100 users is 0.000025% or 1 in 40,000)

Cashback is 9%

Lastminute.com fail to track 6.2% of transactions, which equates to just over £2000 / yr of lost member cashback.


This doesn't sound a lot. But how many people actually spend far more than my conservative £300 with Lastminute.com? And realistically how many people are booking weekend breaks, theatre breaks, last minute holidays throughout summer, Christmas shopping breaks, flights, cars, restaurants, theatre tickets etc etc.

This is one of 4,000 retailers, all of which are failing to track transactions.

Every member visits Quidco 1.25 times a month (average figures, some won't visit, some will visit more).

We are looking at hundreds of thousands, if not millions in untracked and declined transactions.


Some big numbers

Virgin Media don't track 7.5% of transactions, worth up to £125 each.
Sky - 3.4% untracked, worth up to £140 per transaction

Aviva have an appalling 10% failure rate! Why are they still allowed to work through Quidco!?

By comparison, Booking.com manage a 99.9% success rate, proving that this is not rocket science.

Caffe Nero have a 100% record from card transactions, yet B&Q transactions register and never get paid.


And nobody takes responsibility.

My personal stance...I love Quidco, I have done very well from it. I trust Quidco, but I firmly believe that Quidco need to find out specific reasons for declines and state them to the affected users. I don't trust the end retailers and they have no measures in place to make them trustworthy.

Then, and only then, can Quidco become the best player in this market.

Another financial question for Quidco is this. How many members don't pay a £5 admin fee because their declined transactions keep them below the threshold? Maybe this number alone is enough to invest in a better solution.

</rant>

MrX

Twice now I have tried to leave a negative review due to Columbus refusing my cashback.

I always use a seperate clean browser for Quidco to avoid all the cookie issues, so quite simply do not accept that the issue is my side.

I have tried to put this on the review for Columbus , and twice Quidco have sent me and automated reply saying it cant be posted.

They then ask for details of the transaction to look into further. And once again side with Columbus.

So I am stuck in a loop with noy explanation as to why I cant leave my review. Which I guess is because they dont want any negative reviews.

So, when buying with Columbus, buyer beware.

quidco_Company_Representative

Hi there,

I am very sorry to hear that you have had this issue. Please be assured that a claim for your PayPal cashback is not needed.
Your PayPal cashback is linked to your original transaction, therefore if one declines then the other is likely to do so.
However, all you will need to do is raise a declined cashback claim for the declined £7.50 and your PayPal cashback should track within 7 days.
If this does not happen then you can raise a support ticket by going to 'Support' - 'Create contact form' and ask for further assistance from the customer support team.
You may need your PayPal statement, however there should not be any issues.
I do hope that this has reassured you.

Kind Regards,
Quidco Representative

redfox05 wrote: »

Hey all,

I was told the MSE Quidco reps are quite helpful, so here goes my query.

Does anyone know how I can get a response out of Quidco to give me my £7.50 + £36.17 in cashback from when I spent hundreds of pounds with British Airways? It specifically said I would get £7.50 normal quidco cashback plus 5% extra if I paid by Paypal. So I did, it tracked, then it said Declined, for BOTH of them.

And the Quidco Raise a claim option says you cant claim for Paypal Bonus paypments??? What? This is ridiculous. I wouldnt have paid via Paypal otherwise!!

Hope someone can look into this.

quidco_Company_Representative

@Batvink, I do appreciate your points on this, so I hope my response will provide some insight into how things work behind the scenes. I've replied to each aspect of your post below:

batvink wrote: »

Lets say a conservative, average transaction is £300, not unreasonable for hotel bookings. 2 nights for 2 people in London midweek is about £300-£500 when you remove the extremeties (up to £800). Many people book more nights and include theatre tickets, restaurants and so forth.

Lets work with 100 people using Quidco to book through lastminute.com each month (Remember there are 4 million Quidco members! 100 users is 0.000025% or 1 in 40,000)

Cashback is 9%

Lastminute.com fail to track 6.2% of transactions, which equates to just over £2000 / yr of lost member cashback.

When a transaction fails to track, this doesn't mean that the cashback won't get paid. If a claim were to get declined, the retailer will give us a reason for this, and we will always challenge them on this decision if we feel it is incorrect. Non-tracking can be down to a number of reasons, we usually find that if the member has met all the terms for cashback, it'll be that their browser settings (for example cookies not being enabled or using a private window) were set up so that the tracking failed. My point with this is, that if a transaction fails to track, it doesn't mean the member will miss out on cashback at all.

I've looked at some figures on this and taken January as an example. For lastminute.com, 77% of claims were successful, the other claims that weren't successful were deemed ineligible, for a number of reasons. Therefore, the vast majority do still get approved.

Virgin Media don't track 7.5% of transactions, worth up to £125 each.
Sky - 3.4% untracked, worth up to £140 per transaction

Aviva have an appalling 10% failure rate! Why are they still allowed to work through Quidco!?

By comparison, Booking.com manage a 99.9% success rate, proving that this is not rocket science.

I can certainly explain the difference in these statistics for you. Booking.com's tracking reliability is so high as they have their own tracking network, whereas all other retailers run through an affiliate network, so there can be a loss of information this way. We'd like all retailers to offer their own tracking, of course! But unfortunately a lot of retailers aren't able to offer this facility.

To explain, the tracking statistics that are produced on the site are based on how many claims are raised on the site, in comparison to how many track. Due to the way that the cashback process works, this figure would also includes scenarios such as a) the claim is raised too early, and the cashback actually tracks in naturally, b) a claim is raised for a missing bonus when this is actually tracked in later on, manually (specifically in Aviva's case, this is why their statistic appears so low) c) the member genuinely isn't eligible for cashback, again for a number of different reasons.

Caffe Nero have a 100% record from card transactions, yet B&Q transactions register and never get paid.

The reason Caffe Nero's tracking is 100% is purely down to the fact that it is an in-store retailer, and we generally find we don't have any issues with in-store tracking due to the way that this works (i.e., it isn't reliant on browser settings, cookies and such, it's purely just a case of seeing if the member paid with that particular card or not). In regards to B&Q, they don't actually offer in-store cashback anymore (they did a few years ago), so this is why they don't track.

My personal stance...I love Quidco, I have done very well from it. I trust Quidco, but I firmly believe that Quidco need to find out specific reasons for declines and state them to the affected users. I don't trust the end retailers and they have no measures in place to make them trustworthy.

Then, and only then, can Quidco become the best player in this market.

We will always aim provide a reason for why cashback has been declined, if a claim is raised against that transaction. The number of claims that don't get a response from the retailer is extremely low, and we do always chase the retailers as much as possible to ensure all claims have a final response. Decline rates are very low, but if we noticed a retailer was declining a lot of transactions, we would certainly take action on this. We certainly aren't complacent about declined cashback as we have a duty to our members to make sure they receive the cashback that they're eligible for. After all, that's what we're here for!

Another financial question for Quidco is this. How many members don't pay a £5 admin fee because their declined transactions keep them below the threshold? Maybe this number alone is enough to invest in a better solution.

This isn't something that we would have a statistic on, however the ratio of declined cashback to how many transactions are successfully received is again, extremely low.


To summarise, because of the nature of tracking and how it works behind the scenes, it is something that a lot of the time, is dependent on that individual user's settings. As long as you've met all the terms for cashback, there shouldn't be any reason that the cashback doesn't get paid. Of course, if you do feel the decision is incorrect, do always drop us a message and we'll do everything we can do assist.

I do hope this clarifies where we stand in terms of declined cashback and non-tracking, but if you have any other questions, I'll be more than happy to advise further.

Many thanks,

Rosie
Quidco Rep

quidco_Company_Representative

Hi there,

Please do be assured that Quidco encourage members to leave reviews, good or bad. Obviously there are rules in place to ensure that we do not post reviews that are defamatory, or inappropriate etc and reviews should cover all aspects of the purchasing process and also be factually accurate. Unfortunately there may be occasions where we are unable to post reviews for the above reasons but we do contact members directly in this case to explain why and to see if we can assist them further.
I have taken a look into your account and I can see that one of our customer support team did respond to your message this morning and therefore if you do require any further clarification then please get back in touch.

Kind Regards,
Quidco Rep

MrX wrote: »

Twice now I have tried to leave a negative review due to Columbus refusing my cashback.

I always use a seperate clean browser for Quidco to avoid all the cookie issues, so quite simply do not accept that the issue is my side.

I have tried to put this on the review for Columbus , and twice Quidco have sent me and automated reply saying it cant be posted.

They then ask for details of the transaction to look into further. And once again side with Columbus.

So I am stuck in a loop with noy explanation as to why I cant leave my review. Which I guess is because they dont want any negative reviews.

So, when buying with Columbus, buyer beware.

JWIOW

I use Quidco frequently and get on with it well, never had any problems with it at all.
I recently signed up to Tesco.com and placed my first order, however - I have not had the confirmation email to confirm this has gone through successfully, what should I do? It was a £50 spend and new sign up so really wanted this to track.

eco

I have also made a couple of transactions through quidco, and they haven't tracked.

one of them was Body shop I used the code from quidco, every transaction used to track, now it's a bit hit and miss

quidco_Company_Representative

JWIOW wrote: »

I use Quidco frequently and get on with it well, never had any problems with it at all.
I recently signed up to Tesco.com and placed my first order, however - I have not had the confirmation email to confirm this has gone through successfully, what should I do? It was a £50 spend and new sign up so really wanted this to track.

Hi @JWIOW,

I'm sorry to hear that this hasn't tracked to your account but not to worry.

When a cashback fails to track we have a manual claim process that we can use to add this to your account. You can start this process by going to the 'support' tab on the top right of your homepage and then selecting 'create cashback claim'.

Alternatively, please contact our customer support team directly and we can help you with that.

Kind regards,

Brendan
Quidco Rep

quidco_Company_Representative

eco wrote: »

I have also made a couple of transactions through quidco, and they haven't tracked.

one of them was Body shop I used the code from quidco, every transaction used to track, now it's a bit hit and miss

Hi @eco,

I'm sorry to hear that you're having issues with your cashback tracking to your account.

If you could contact our support team directly we can take a look at each missing cashback and help you to get these added in.

Kind regards,

Brendan
Quidco Rep

GreatheadShield

Hello,

I booked a Walt Disney holiday through quidco and estimated payout date was 13 Oct 2014, but 'Payment Delay' is now showing next to this transaction.

When should I expect the Cashback?