Topcashback Questions & Answers

Schnurrbart

Hello Matt (TCB Representative), if you are reading this:

I sent an email to you at ‘mse@topcashback.co.uk’ (subject line: ‘[EXTERNAL EMAIL] Booking.com purchase amount discrepancy’) on 26/04/19, and re-sent it on 30/04/19 as I had not received a reply. May I ask you again for a response (via email, not on this forum)? Thank you.

While I’m here, I’d also like to address a problem that I’ve encountered (not for the first time) regarding the ‘expected cashback’ rate given when making a claim for an untracked purchase.

To help keep a tab on things I record my cashback-eligible purchases in a spreadsheet with relevant details, one of which is the rate of cashback offered on the date of purchase. I check this carefully, as I’m fully aware that different rates can be offered for various product categories (or other variables).

Recently, there have been occasions when the ‘expected cashback’ displayed when making a claim for an untracked transaction is at odds with the rate that I’ve recorded. As this ‘expected cashback’ rate cannot be adjusted, I have added a note to my claim stating that the rate at the time of purchase was actually x%. It is very galling to receive a response insisting that the ‘expected cashback’ rate was correct, and on top of this, I worry that TCB think that I’m trying it on, or that the accuracy of my record-keeping leaves much to be desired!

This has just happened with my latest claim (for an untracked Zavvi purchase at a rate of 8% cashback), only with an extra dollop or two of confusion! As the ‘expected cashback’ rate was 2.5% I included the following text in a note accompanying my claim: “Yet again, when submitting this claim, the 'expected cashback' is different to what was offered at the time of purchase. The 'expected cashback' was given as 2.5%, whereas it was 8% on the transaction date. I know that the 'expected cashback' does not include the Plus-member top-up, but unless the Plus member top-up is an extra 5.5%, then there will still be a shortfall.” *

Yesterday I received a message saying:

“Each offer title provides a different rate of cashback, you have stated the offer title relating to your purchase to be "ZBOX Sale purchase" at a rate of 2.5% cashback. For us to confirm the correct details are submitted on your claim, please confirm the offer title that best suits your purchase from the list below?

Clothing
Console and Electronics
DVD & Blu-Ray
Games
Printed Products
Purchase made with a Voucher Code
Toys, Gifts & Memorabilia
ZBOX 1 Month, 3 Month, 6 Month and 12 Month Subscriptions
ZBOX Sale purchase”

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not 100% sure of this (I would be if I’d taken a screenshot - we’ll get on to that in due course), but I am pretty sure that most, if not all, of those categories were at 8%. Even if this were not the case, I am certain that all of the categories which my purchase - a book & T-shirt bundle - could come under (Clothing/Printed Products/ZBOX Sale Purchase) had a rate of 8%. I would not have recorded 8% on the spreadsheet if, for example, that rate only applied to the ‘Games’ category - I knew what I was going to buy before clicking through from TCB to Zavvi. Confusingly, the wording of the above message implies that I’m claiming at a rate of 2.5%, when I made it clear that - at least as far as I was concerned - the rate should be 8% (which was the main reason for sending my message in the first place!). Notice that my contention that the rate was 8% is not addressed anywhere in the reply, although it is implicitly rejected by the reiteration of the 2.5% rate.

Furthermore, I had already given my reason for selecting the ‘ZBOX Sale purchase’ category in my original message: “The purchase was for a T-shirt & book bundle. It arrived in 'ZBox' packaging, so I've selected 'ZBox sale' as the category - sorry if this is not correct.” (As I said above, my purchase could also be classed as Clothing and/or Printed Products.) So why ask me again which category my purchase was in? I have already told you to the best of my knowledge (more of an educated guess under the circumstances); asking me a second time is not going to grant me some kind of magical insight into which of the three different possible categories is correct according to TCB’s/Zavvi’s definition! Conversely, surely TCB would know which category the purchase is in (or could easily contact Zavvi to find out, and let me know for future reference). It seems a very odd practice to ask me to provide an answer that you yourselves are far better placed to obtain, especially when I have already given an answer and explained that I’d arrived at it as best I could.

In light of this, it’s clear that from now on I’m going to have to take a screenshot of the offer page every time I click through from TCB to make an eligible purchase in case I later have to lodge a claim for an untracked transaction (which happens with depressing frequency despite the ‘We've recorded your visit’ window appearing every time) and, when doing so, find that the ‘expected cashback’ rate is lower than it should be (even accounting for the Plus-member top-up). Need I point out that it’s a sad state of affairs when a customer feels that they have to resort to this because they know they may need to vindicate themselves further down the line?

Finally, while I’m in a somewhat critical mode, I must say that I was very disappointed by TCB’s response to my request for reimbursement during the recent Zeek debacle. I had around £43 credit in my Zeek account, a combination of payouts from both TCB and Quidco. I don’t know how that amount was split between the two of you. TCB basically told me there was nothing they could do about it, whereas Quidco, even though I’d told them that only some of that £43 was withdrawn from them (the same way I’d told you that only some of it was a TCB payout) credited the full amount to my account. I’ll refrain from further comment; I think that the two different responses speak for themselves.

Sorry for such a long post (and my sincere apologies to those of a TL;DR persuasion for having to spend so many valuable milliseconds scrolling past this - not that they’ll see this apology if they are true to their initialism), but my previous messages (via emails and claims/support tickets) regarding the ‘expected cashback’ issue have thus far failed to draw a satisfactory response from TCB, who have either ignored the issue or, at best, glossed over it. The most helpful TCB have been in this regard is to suggest that, where necessary, I add a note to my claim stating the correct cashback rate. Sensible advice, but as you have seen, all that happens when I do that is I get a reply contradicting my contention and insisting that the ‘expected cashback’ rate is correct. Therefore I’m hoping that posting here will ‘encourage’ TCB to address the subject directly and in greater depth (and hopefully not result in my TCB account being mysteriously closed!).

Okay, I’m done for the time being! I look forward to your reply (via email) to my email dated 26/04/19, and to your response (on this forum) regarding the ‘expected cashback’ issue. Thanks in advance for your help/advice/comments.

* Based on previous experience, I even anticipated the problem by going on to say: “I fully expect to receive a response insisting that the rate was not 8% on 21/02/19.” Sadly, I was right!

Molineux99

100% scammed !!


I booked a hotel through Agoda in good faith - fast forward TWENTY MONTHS of TopcashBack telling me they are 'investigating' it and then its ended with 'link must have been broken or wrong affiliate' - just google how many times they pull that stunt. I work in IT I know how it works, I know if there is a problem - absolute shameful nonsense - why did their claims deprtment not realise that in the previous 1.6 YEARS then ???



They then bluntly told me that they cannot appeal it and have to 'stand behind the decision' - what they don't say is who said there is no appeal route ? who said they have to stand behind the decision ?



So essentially Agoda got a near £1000 booking out of me, TopCashback will have got their commission and I get nothing but twenty months of grief !! Great business model eh ?



Have never used Agoda or Topcashback since and never will - its simply a scam that there is no way of tracking ! If they don't fancy paying you they simply say there was a problem and case closed !!


The booking is clearly visible so Agoda or Topcashback should have honoured the deal - instead they just walk away with the cash and stuff the customer - lets just tell them something went wrong !

sillygoose

Hello Matt (TCB Representative),

Quick question, I have a couple of cashbacks from Maplin sitting pending on my account. As Maplin long went bust I don't expect any cashback will ever appear. Can I remove them or will they just sit there forever?

Cheers
Rob

Joseph12862

Hi there, I’ve got a question about Zeek - realising just now that they’ve gone under. I transferred what I’d earnt from TopCashback to Zeek and hadn’t yet used it. Could you advise what I do to get this money back please ? Thanks

VfM4meplse

Another Topcashback newbie here.

Just tried to order via Topcashback on Amazon and the product price has suddenly hiked. Co-incidence or common practice?

TopCashBack_Company_Representative

Hey everyone,

@Schnurrbart – I will certainly get to your email as soon as I can for you. When you lodge a claim when you select the retailer and the date you then get asked to select the offer and this is key to the cashback amount being calculated correctly. It could be here where the issue with your claim is happening so it is worth a double check.

Once you select that under where it says purchase amount it says the amount you are expecting so next time you need to lodge a claim can you cross check that for me?

In regards to zeek, I will ad open and as transparent as I can be as it may appear from the outlook that we’re just being harsh and not awarding lost funds while another site may try to make out it’s handling it differently and while it’s lovely they have awarded you the money back, I’d like to explain a little more the differences here and also what we have to consider.

We removed them as a payout back in October and this is down to sudden changes they were making to how vouchers could be redeemed. We didn’t believe it was in the best interest of our members to keep them on site as a payout method. This was when the last voucher was issues.

Compare this to the other site you mention, who listed them as a payout method and issues vouchers until very close to when the insolvency information was made available. This means while our members did have a number of months to spend their vouchers (including the Christmas period) other sites had little or no time to spend theirs.

While other sites may have, case by case decided to award the money back to provide and apparently better experience, that lost funds still has to be accounted for. So whether this is taken from the wider memberbase or elsewhere it would affect a much bigger memberbase and we have to consider that when making our judgements.

We don’t necessarily feel it would be fair to just award those members who get in touch querying the vouchers and while it may be a nice advantage to those who reach out, for a company that prides itself on fair play, we don’t think that’s the right thing to do.

I completely understand why you wish to challenge our judgment, hope I have laid out here why we can’t bring you the resolution you were after.

@Molineux99 – We will help members avoid the commission being paid elsewhere but I am afraid we can’t stop it. We can’t put some sort of ad blocker on your device that blocks everyone else putting cookies on your device for their personal gain, as much as we’d love to and as much as we’d love to avoid this decline reason coming up.

I need to make clear here that TopCashback has gained £0 commission from your purchase as that’s the meaning of not last referrer. We’re not due any commission. It completely contracts our business model to suggest we’ve earned some commission and not pass it back to you.

Someone’s cookie, a voucher code or some sort of trace was on your purchase to another source. They have been paid and not us and while we’re do our best to help you avoid this we can’t force our cookie through to be the one that should be paid.

@sillygoose – While I am happy to remove them, due to the tricky situations with administrations it’s not advisable as we may get some or all of the money and so what I would advise is keep them on your account until they get marked as declined as only then can we be sure we won’t get any money to pass back to you.

@Joseph12862 – Hopefully my response to Schnurrbart has helped explain this situation for you.


@VfM4meplse – Prices should not inflate after using our links and please feel free to submit evidence of this happening to mse@topcashback.co.uk so I can review 😊

Best wishes,
Matt

Schnurrbart

Hi Matt


I hope you've had a pleasant Bank Holiday break. Now it's "Once more unto the breach" for you! Thanks for replying to my email, and for your response to my earlier post. I promise to keep this one shorter!


Thanks for clarifying your position regarding Zeek. It is true that "the other site" were still offering and promoting Zeek credit as a payout option even when there were rumblings of something amiss. I hadn't even checked my Zeek account for some weeks, and was unaware of those rumblings when they first, er, rumbled; it was only when Zeeks' insolvency was announced that I looked around the net and found the warning signs on social media, etc. Your comments are pretty much consistent with what I have read about the situation from other sources. It must have been an awkward situation, and I appreciate your candour.



I still need to confirm the category for my Zavvi purchase in order for the claim to proceed, but as I've already asked (to no avail), which is the correct one from TCB's/Zavvi's point of view? I'm repeating myself here, but I don't understand why I'm being asked what the correct category is, when surely TCB must know the answer already (or, if not, could easily contact Zavvi to find out, and would then know for future reference). Just to remind you, the purchase was a T-shirt & book bundle, and arrived in ZBox packaging. I therefore chose 'ZBox sale purchase' when submitting my claim, but am being told that the correct rate (at least for that category) is 2.5%. I suspect that, even if I selected one of the other two possible categories (Clothing or Printed Products), I would be told that 2.5% was the correct rate for them as well (whereas I'm maintaining that it was 8% for all the categories, even the non-applicable ones).


There are only two possibilities, as I see it. Either the rate really is (despite my contention) 2.5% whichever the category, in which case it's pointless TCB asking me to select a different category, or Clothing or Printed Products were at 8% (and ZBox 2.5%), in which case TCB could help me out by actually telling me which category my purchase comes under.


Bottom line: please tell me which category I should select for my purchase. Thanks!

stemcgoo

So whats the oldest TCB claim out there?

I’m fast approaching 3 YEARS for a claim made for a cruise booking made with Royal Caribbean in August 2016. You can appreciate its a not insignificant amount for a holiday booking.

I also have another one from January 2018 which like others recently posted, TCB have gone quiet on since actually offering me the wrong amount of cashback, which as I have challenged and proven what the purchase amount was (less taxes) they have again gone quiet on.

Uselss aren't they?

Molineux99

@Matt re post 4480



Just utter nonsense - you stated this


Someone’s cookie, a voucher code or some sort of trace was on your purchase to another source. They have been paid and not us and while we’re do our best to help you avoid this we can’t force our cookie through to be the one that should be paid.


So right there you've admitted its an absolute lottery whether cashback is due or not - if it wasn't there wouldn't be hundreds of pages/threads of people complaining about not receiving it.

Moving on - so why did it take you 1.6 YEARS to come to that conclusion ? Is obfuscation a tactic ?

Onto the rogue cookies you're hiding behind - explain this one - on ANOTHER failed cashback I, through you, booked two hotel stays on Expedia -booked one set of three days, then immediately another three days - you paid cashback for the first then pulled the 'another affiliate' stunt for the second. The two transactions were SECONDS apart, only the drop down window for the calendar was used and yet those clever little cookies managed to nip in and take the cash for the second stay right ? Nonsense. (I also have a very robust AD blocker on at all times)

What percentage of claims fail ? I would love to know that.

You also claim that a commission HAS been paid out (after 1.6 years) - so who was it paid too ? If assuming Agoda paid it to someone, they can provide that information right ? do you have phones ? How much effort did you make to track this down ? Clearly not a lot.

You also dodged the questions as to 'who said you cannot appeal' ? and 'who said you have to stand behind the decision' ? Was it Agoda ? If it was why is that the case ? If it wasn't then given you are the only other party concerned you must be talking to yourselves!

Several other people fell foul of your Agoda link up according to Google, and shamefully you are still doing business with them even after numerous people have clearly been ripped off.

Given the sheer lottery of getting paid, and whether you state that people should not make a transaction based on cashback, your business model is clearly just that and the contract between you and the customer is clearly inferred. With this in mind I have forwarded this episode to trading standards as this is simply a scam in many cases that needs looking at - I have also forwarded it onto Agoda, asking them who they have paid commission to (unless of course someone at TCB can be bothered) and secondly to inform them, not happy to be scammed. I will never use them again (naturally nor TCB either)

So over to you Martyn Lewis - you claim you're a man of the people who loves to stop people being scammed - this must be right up your street - start with google as to how many people this affects and go from there ....(or of course just skim through the 4,500 posts on this thread alone, seems to be a lot of unhappy bunnies in there too)

TopCashBack_Company_Representative

Hey everyone,

@Schnurrbart – Thanks for your understanding, as you say the lack of rumblings certainly didn’t help and if we have any inclination of what was to be we would have contacted members urging them to spend any money they had left as we have done with similar situations with other providers.

I don’t suppose you still have a link to what you purchased do you? (Feel free to email it to me at mse@topcashback.co.uk if you don’t want to publicly share) That will help me to identify the best category for this purchase for you.

@stemcgoo – I mean, of course, I’m going to be biased here but the term useless suggests that we have no ability to assist with claims which is just far from the truth. We recover millions of pounds for our members through the claims process and not only that have made changes internally to make things better.

Of course, there are some very frustrating situations for us when no matter how much we push we’re not getting an outcome we can give to you and this does put us in a tricky situation.

Ultimately, it comes down to one decision, do we give up or do we continue to fight your corner until we get somewhere. Other sites may feel the cheaper and quickest option is to just give up, we don’t and yes this does mean you’re waiting longer but we believe that long wait is better if it leads to something positive.

Of course, we can’t always guarantee it will be a success when we get that final outcome but we’d rather do everything we can to get you a positive result. If you would like me to check out your claim please do drop me a message at mse@topcashback.co.uk

@Molineux99 – Cashback is not a lottery but that doesn’t make it guaranteed. Apart from very rare cases such as retailer administrations, if you follow our advice to help tracking, there’s little reason why your cashback will be declined.

Of course we can’t run through everything on your device which may be putting cookies on your device but it is something the owner of the device should be able to do.

I am happy to explain what I think has happened with Expedia. You clicked through us to get the purchase, you gained our cookie. All is well. Cashback paid as expected.

The issue here is the second purchase, no doubt cookies weren’t cleared or you purchased straight away in the same window. The Expedia site itself will likely be credited with the sale as that website was the cause of you making that second sale, not us. Therefore, we’re not seen as the last referrer.

You may be able to find who the referrer is from the retailer, doing the usual steps to gather all the data the retailer holds on you but we can’t necessarily provide that information as the majority of the times the tracking network will not be willing to share with us information about a competitor.

Not last referrer is a dead end, would it be right for us to drag things out for another year or so knowing you’re going to get the same response back? Your post makes very clear here you don’t like waiting for claims to be resolved and so I don’t think you’d agree with us doing this.

MSE has a great resource about cashback sites and all the pros and cons, it’s an interesting read and also explains, as we do that cashback is not guaranteed. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/cashback-websites/

Best wishes,
Matt