cashback

Shopmium – cashback on grocery shopping

by
A screenshot of the Shopmium app

If you fancy small discounts on your grocery shopping each week, you could give Shopmium a try. It’s a cashback app, where if you buy certain promoted products, and upload a receipt, you’ll get some of the cost back.

I’ve used Shopmium and similar apps for a while. There used to be one called Shopitize, that worked in the same way, but it seems to have closed down (although its web site is still live). There’s also CheckoutSmart and GreenJinn, which work in a similar way, although to date I’ve never found anything in CheckoutSmart that I’ve actually wanted to buy. GreenJinn focuses on sustainable and/or vegan products, but also sometimes offers cashback on supermarket own-brand fruit and veg. Of the three, I have the most success with Shopmium.

Once you’ve signed up to Shopmium, you’ll need to download their app. At the top of the app, you can filter it by supermarket; some cashback offers are only valid at certain supermarkets. Once you’ve bought an eligible item, you scan the barcode, and upload a receipt. If it’s approved, then your account is credited with cashback.

Shopmium used to pay out for each individual cashback claim, but now you need to accumulate a minimum of £10 of claims before you can be paid. The money is sent by BACS to your bank account.

Once you’ve made 10 claims, you move up to ‘Gold’ status in Shopmium. This offers extra benefits, like a treat on your birthday and being able to see offers before they’re live, but to maintain your status you need to make at least one cashback claim every month. I’ve been a gold member for a couple of months, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to maintain it. A lot of the products on offer are things that I would never buy. And sometimes, even with the cashback, there will be supermarket own brands that are cheaper. Oh, and (for the most part) it only works at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose and Co-Op. We tend to do the majority of our shopping at Lidl, and some offers aren’t valid there.

If you fancy trying Shopmium, you can sign up with my referral code CI54t4. I believe this gets you a free gift, which looks to be a bag of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk buttons.

App of the Week: Quidco ClickSnap

by

Quidco is one of the UK’s most popular cashback sites, and one of two that I’m a member of – the other being Top CashBack. Quidco has recently launched an app called ClickSnap, which I’ve been using recently.

Until now, cashback web sites have been entirely online affairs. To qualify, you go to the cashback web site, and then click through a referral link to an online retailer and make a purchase. The cashback site then pays you the referral commission generated from that purchase, rather than keeping it for itself.

The ClickSnap app takes this offline, and into real-world bricks and mortar shops. Once you have downloaded the app to your phone and signed in to your Quidco account, it will show you a list of products that have cashback offers available. This can be filtered by store, as not every offer is available everywhere.

The clever bit happens once you have bought the products. Open the ClickSnap app, and then tap the camera button in the top right-hand corner. To prove that you have bought the products, you use your phone’s camera to take photos of the receipt, showing your purchases. The app will allow you to take multiple shots and stitch them together if it has been a particularly large shop.

Once submitted, it usually takes a couple of days for the cashback to appear in your Quidco account. So far, I’ve used it for four purchases, and received cashback for three of them. You can chase up missing cashback after 14 days if you haven’t received it, but it can never be guaranteed that you will get it. Bear this in mind if you buy something just for the potential money back.

Most of the deals in ClickSnap give you money off the product – usually 20-40 pence – but one actually gave you the full cost back as a rebate. So there’s a pack of Hartley’s Raspberry Jelly in our cupboard that effectively cost me nothing, rather than 44p. Some offers require you to buy combinations of products, such as the Coca-Cola and Walls sausages deal in the screenshot. And not all offers are available at all retailers – again, in the screenshot, one of the deals is only redeemable at Sainsbury’s and another at Asda. There is also a limit of how many times you can redeem the offer – usually three or four times.

You will also find that most of the items that are eligible for cashback are branded items. I tend to buy own-brands and usually they’re cheaper than the branded items, even after cashback.

Because of the small amounts, this is unlikely to save you big bucks, but the potential savings may add up over time. And it may make some premium brands more affordable.

ClickSnap is free, and is available on Android and iOS. A Quidco account is required to use it.