How Do Cash Back Apps Work

Affil Coin
5 min readJan 18, 2020

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While saving 50 Cents off a couple of purchases may not look like a large amount of money right now, imagine doing that for about a year. Depending on how many purchases you may make each year, there’s a possibility you could end up with as much as $500 or $1,000 as the profit made from 50 Cent recovered from every purchase you make.

This is exactly why many money savvy people with a knack for saving love to buy from shops and stores that offer a percentage off of the total amount spent. This is exactly what cashback is and it’s a popular concept in the credit card industry to encourage people to open a card. That being said, there are ways to earn cash back on your purchases without opening a credit card.

In the digital world today, consumers can find online marketplaces that reward users for buying from a store or app that refunds you a certain percentage of the total amount of money you spent on the particular item. These cashback sites combine the money spent with the money earned. Cashback sites have become very popular and some of the top ones to look out for include:

  • Befrugal
  • Rakuten
  • Ibotta

While there are a number of these cashback sites, these mentioned above happen to be the top and best ones anyone deciding to venture into this industry should try out.

How Cash Back Apps Work

Before we dive into how cashback apps work, it is important that we get a clearer idea of what these apps are first. These apps are simple, instead of buying directly from a shop or an online store, you can access the online store of the retailer through a cashback link. While you receive the product directly from the retailer, you are also given a percentage of your total spending. Most of these cashback sites have links from insurance policies, groceries, as well as a huge selection of digital deals.

These cashback apps work by offering buyers links to the products sold by other online stores. To get started, all you have to do is get registered on one of the many cash back apps. Oftentimes the membership is free and when choosing a number of cashback apps, there are a couple of factors you need to take into consideration.

Once you are signed up on the app, each time you want to make a purchase, instead of heading straight to the store of the seller, you visit the app. On the app, you will then need to find the product you want to purchase to click the link from your preferred and supported vendor. Once that is done, users simply need to simply need to complete the purchase to get qualified for the cash back reward. Once that purchase is complete, you are given a total percentage of the total amount of money you spent. When it comes to qualifying for cash back, there are two things users should keep in mind.

  1. You need to spend a certain amount on qualifying purchases before being able to withdraw your cashback reward. It may be easy to confuse these apps as scams because users will not receive a percentage of the money as a cash back reward until they make enough purchases. Often this means spending around $100 or more on the platform and then a withdrawal will be available. Before you make a purchase, it is best that you find out the qualifying amount and know this prior to shopping if the minimum threshold will work for your shopping needs on that platform.
  2. The rate of return available at the time of purchase is another important factor that can easily be overlooked. Before making that purchase, you need to find out the rate you get for spending a certain amount of money. This will ensure that your purchase will qualify you for a cashback reward. Sometimes, especially for things like groceries, you can save up over time to get the cash back reward as well. If you have the time, you could look at the rate of other retailers before finally picking one to start earning rewards on.

Once you take these two factors to heart, then there’s a higher chance you’ll get a larger percentage of the amount you’ve spent. Thus saving the most money will require users to find a cash back platform that offers a good percentage back on purchases and also offers a diverse set of products which can be purchased on the platform. Platforms that operate within markets where they regularly shop anyways make the best fit for users looking to capitalize upon cash back rewards.

Where Do Cash Back Apps Get Money From?

To better understand how to capitalize upon the cash back rewards, understanding how the inner workings of the model works can empower users to make the most from their cash back reward program.

Let’s take a look at an example, a cashback app is offering you about 7% of your total purchase for products that are worth $300. This product could either be a TV, smartphone, or any other device. Once you complete the purchase for the item in question, you are given $21 back as cashback. Now the question is where do these apps get the money to settle these payments?

First, these sites develop partnerships and form relationships with online vendors and stores. According to the agreement, these cash back apps, receive cash from these stores for referring their sites to their website visitors. When they receive this cash for referrals, they share them with customers who buy products by clicking on their links.

In essence, the money paid back to buyers come from online stores or merchants themselves. They pay these sites or apps a percentage for referring customers who make purchases worth a certain amount on their site. Then, in turn, these cashback apps pay a part a portion of the money received to their customers to encourage them to come back.

These cashback apps try to offer their customers better rates to encourage them to visit often. One of the top apps, BeFrugal has been reported to offer cash backs to over 5,000 different online merchants.

Factors To Consider Before Choosing A Cash Back App

As mentioned earlier, there are a couple of features you need to consider when choosing the best cashback app, other smaller factors include:

  1. The payment method — shen choosing an app, the payment should be taken into consideration. Most of the apps either want buyers to redeem their rewards through PayPal, gift cards, or even checks.
  2. The payout frequency — there’s every possibility that you may not be paid as soon as you receive the cash. You need to take into consideration how fast they are able to make payments.
  3. The payout qualifications — this has to be the most important part. You need to know the amount of money you have to spend before you earn cashback.

In closing, remember to shop around for cash back platform before you start to invest the time it takes to earn a reward. As always, the team here at Affil Coin is happy to help where we can. So, if you ever have any questions, stop by the Affil Coin Telegram chat and talk to a member of our team! Furthermore, if you want to learn more about cash back platforms, click here and visit the Affil Coin site!

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