What are the drawbacks of Shopback?

To use shopback is actually no cost to you so no harm trying.

Shopback basically gives you cashback for using them since they are paid a commission for driving sales to their partners.

Below is my cashback history and the money that i have received. It is literally free money given to you when you spend through Shopback.

Besides using it for online shopping to get cashback, you can also use it to get cashback for offline spending from many F&B with their newest product "ShopBack Go"

I have "saved" alot of money using ShopBack Go when eating at restaurants that they have partnered with.

You can actually stack it with other rewards and wrote an article to show how it works. ( https://justbeingernest.blogspot.com/2019/07/be... )

Shopback in a way is just sharing their revenue with you.

The vendor pays show back a percentage of fee say 5%. For example 150 dollars for a 3k product. Shopback then shares 2% back to you and keep 3% to themselves as revenue. So you can back 60 dollars etc.

Its a new form of marketing and company loves it to an extend since they might not have to pay until They make.

Hey there friend! I felt the exact same way as well before I tried it around 3 years back haha.

When things are too good to be true, it probably is. However, the whole digital internet economy has changed abit of that.

And in the case of ShopBack, it's in the idea of affliate marketing.

Sounds like a complicated term to understand, but to explain it in simple english:

• John wants to buy a Macbook from Apple
• The Macbook costs $2,000
• However, if he goes through ShopBack (online portal) and clicks through
• John will still pay $2,000

Behind the scenes:

• Apple will pay ShopBack 5% = $100 as a "marketing referral fee"
• ShopBack will rebate 2% = back to John as "cashback" = $40
• ShopBack earns the balance of 3% = $60 as revenue

Hope that answers your question and yes, Apple still makes a good amount of money after netting off that referral fees that they paid ShopBack because of the high margins of the products.

That's pretty much it! And I would say the only draw back is having to remember to click through the online portal and some people are simply very lazy to do that.

But personally I have saved $800 in cashback, yes in pure, hard, cold cash. And Seedly, being part of the ShopBack family, we see a HUGE and INCREASING trend of online shoppers using ShopBack to get savings off on a daily basis via LAZADA, Shopee, ZALORA, and online groceries like Fairprice Online, Cold Storage online etc. Super interesting indeed.

Sometimes if you use shopback you're not able to get specific discount provided by merchant directly. For example if you buy car insurance from fwd, you cannot use both fwd promo code and shopback concurrently.

If you don't use the promo code, your insurance amount will be like 1600 with 45 cashback from shopback.

But if you use promo code from fwd, your premium is about 1200

That's the huge disadvantage