Two quick payment notes!

1. April BACS We’ve had several tickets asking about payments. Please note there was a bank holiday in there - you should expect 3-5 working days which means anytime before Friday max.

2. PayPal We also get a lot of tickets asking about PayPal at this time of month. We really recommend BACS instead as it goes out directly to your bank account at end of month. The PayPal payments go in a big queue and take up to 10 days depending on the length of the queue, then you have to wait for PayPal to clear. It is SLOW! So if you are looking for fast payments use BACS instead as it is much quicker. Wait until mid-month to switch so that the 10 day security hold doesn’t affect your end of month payment.

That other blog is so serious it couldn’t stand any frivolity - so here to keep things light is the discussion blog for the Third Birthday contest

To read about the contest check out the main page here. The long and short is that you can submit either an original photo or video using the Quidco logo and on the theme of “Threes” to win. We’ve got three great judged prizes for each category (including a pair of Air France tickets anywhere in the world and a XBOX/42″ TV combo!!) as well as two Member’s Choice prizes in each category (based on other member’s votes).

You can vote for videos and photos as they come in (change your vote at any time) and these votes count for the Member’s Choice prizes!

If you have any questions please post in comments below. To kick things off though and get you all in the mood take a look at a few of the winners from previous years’ contests!

Last year’s video winner was on a quest for Steve Coogan… watch it through we promise it’s worth it!

One of the winners from the 1st birthday competition got a little carried away with cello tape and Quidco logos…

Another winner from last year found a tank, stretched an accent and… bonza :p

So now that you’re inspired get out there and do something useful this bank holiday weekend! Good luck everyone!

If you haven’t noticed from the front page, it’s Quidco’s third birthday and we’re throwing the annual party to celebrate

We’re now rolling into our fourth!?! year of Quidco’ing. Each year when we hit this point it’s a real cause for reflection where we try to sit back and think about how far we’ve come in the past year and where we need to go.

In the past year the site really hit stride. Quidco is probably not mainstream yet but it sure feels like we have exploded everywhere. In the past year the site has grown to 16 staff (18 if including the two we’re hiring right now) in two locations (our main Sheffield base and London); we’ve been featured or mentioned in pretty much every big broadsheet, consumer site and even BBC ONE and we’re now serving 10 million pages a month! During the Christmas period alone Quidco members earned over £2.7m of cashback

The point though is that none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for all the members who have supported us through these three years. The reason Quidco exists is because enough of you have believed in the idea to be there for us through the ups and the downs. The concept of using advertising money as cashback for a community means that the industry technology, tracking and processes have had to be totally revamped which isn’t a pain-free process!

Looking back over the past year where else have we come besides just pure growth? We think our biggest achievement this year has been in making a member support team that scales (the team now works on a 24 hour turn around and generally achieves it!) and implementing the SureShop processes to make cashback more reliable. This hasn’t been easy and we are continually improving it but statistically we were able to resolve 85% of enquiries in 2007 (even though SureShop only fully rolled out in late fall) compared to 56% in 2006. We now are resolving 100% of enquiries and cleaning up old outstanding ones (the complete resolution of 2005 enquiries is an example of that).

Looking forward what do we see for year four… Our priority is going to be on continuing to improve our support especially with enquiries. We have an update to the system which we will be rolling out soon which will hopefully make that process simpler. We also want to make Quidco easier to use overall! The roll-out of our user dashboard page is the first step in that process. Beyond that we are always working hard to make sure Quidco members have the best cashback rates, crazy cashback offers and all sorts of extra bonuses and promotions

So bring on year four! As noted on the birthday contest page we think Quidco is such great evidence that a consumer site can be ad-free, spam-free and actually care about members first! We’ve grown from something so small but it seems we are riding a much bigger consumer trend towards honesty and transparency.

A huge thanks to all Quidco members who drive us forward with compliments and criticisms, who contribute to the power of this community and who make this site what it is today.

From all of us at Quidco

Sharp eyed Quidco members may have noted a new link called ‘Home’ appear in their personal link menu. This is a new dashboard that collects the most important info about your account into one spot (such as recent payment, changes in your account, newest tracked items). We are rolling this out slowly to avoid any performance problems but once we are sure it will cope with the high traffic volume it will become the default page when you login to Quidco.

Enjoy!

We are currently hiring for new entry-level member support and administration positions so we thought we’d pop them up on the blog in case any members are interested! Both of these positions are available to start immediately. Please note the positions are Sheffield based and you would need to come in to the city centre. If you’re interested please submit applications via email, with your CV attached, to jobs at quidco.com.

Position: Administration

We’re looking for a responsible, self-motivated and efficient person to help with administration. The position comprises managing and updating data through a web based administrative platform.

Good typing and communication skills are essential. Experience with data entry, invoicing and payment reconciliation is a bonus.

Position: Member Support

We’re looking for someone to fill a member support position. The work is primarily based around managing and updating various data through a web based administrative platform and secondly dealing with first tier member support enquiries.

Good typing and communication skills are essential, as is an excellent grasp on written English and grammar.

***The £100 Quidco cashback for o2 has now ended.***

This is a quick tip we’ve just picked up for anyone looking for an iPhone. o2 have dropped the price on the 8GB model £100 today from £269 to £169. To top this up we’ve got huge o2 cashback right now with £100 Quidco cashback - this only runs for another 5 days though!

The rumour is that Apple may be coming out with a 3G version in a month or two which is why there is price cutting happening now. However if you don’t care about waiting for a 3G version then we’d say jump on this deal now!

Please note that o2 takes a 2-3 days to track in so please don’t panic if you don’t see the cashback show on your Quidco account right away!

**PLEASE NOTE** Cashback will only be paid on connected contracts. *********

Some of you may have noticed a warning message saying “Quidco Tracking Issue Detected” when clicking through to certain merchants. This is a new tool for our members’ benefit that we’re testing out.

If you get this warning, it means the new tracking checker tool has detected that something on your computer is preventing the tracking cookie(s) from being set properly. It’s in place to give you a chance to double-check the items here, especially the security settings.

We hope this is something that our members will find useful, as it will help prevent missing transactions - and most importantly, it will help prevent the delay of having to submit enquiries for missing transactions!

***WINNER***

Thanks to everyone for taking part in this fabulous contest, and we could like to extend congratulations to our winner, lellert!

Please remember to subscribe to the email newsletter or RSS feed so you’ll be notified about our next great contest!

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We’ve got a serious bit of schwag this time with an extremely nice, extremely pricey, Maurice Lacroix watch from Goldsmiths. Goldsmiths are the obvious jeweller of choice if you are going to buying quality jewellry online and have increased their cashback for April to 18% (which let’s admit it would be a heft payback in your Quidco account if you sprung for their top end Corum watch for £14,500!). They also have set-up a 5% discount on all items excluding sale items for Quidco members clicking through from Quidco.

Now the fun bit… to grab a chance to win this watch all you have to do is visit Goldsmiths through the Quidco link, find your favourite watch and then come back and make a blog comment stating the watch and what time it is displaying

We will keep the comments open until April 11th midnight. We will then pick a winner by midnight Sunday (gives us a bit of time) from the eligible comments posted using random.org.

Have fun! And don’t forget the cashback if something does catch your eye

Goldsmiths 18% Quidco cashback

Following several questions in the Betfair blog post we thought it would be a good idea to recap for new (and existing) members why missing transactions happen and how to claim for them.

First, missing transactions happen when the merchant does not report back to us that a sale has happened. All Quidco links go through a third party network which drops a cookie in your browser, this cookie is then later checked when you complete checkout/registration at a merchant. If the cookie is not there or if your computer blocks the network from checking for that cookie or calling up a tracking image then your sale is not reported to the network and thus nothing tracks in on Quidco.

Most of the time this problem is due to ad-blocking or internet security software on your computer. Most people these days run some kind of ad-blocking software (whether Norton, McAfee, Firefox plugin or built-in to Internet Explorer) - this software can see the tracking cookies as ads and ad-tracking and block them. Now you may want this to be blocked when doing general internet browsing but for Quidco transactions to track that needs to be allowed.

We have many members who use a second browser just for Quidco so that they can run strict anti-ad rules when doing normal browsing but loose ones for Quidco tracking. For example IE7 for regular browsing and Firefox for Quidco.

This is the most common reason but there can be many others like competing cookies (tracking cookies set from another website you visited with ads), using a discount code not sourced from Quidco, changing the merchant url after going through Quidco, not completing your sale online, not completing the offer, or problems with the merchant’s implementation of tracking.

Basically Quidco needs to be seen as the last referrer so that we can claim the cashback for you.

If you do have persistent problems with tracking we do recommend carefully going through your computer setup. We have a pretty detailed list of trouble-shooting steps here: Troubleshooting and setup

With Betfair we have had members help us narrow down tracking problems with them and, as noted on their page, it seems depositing with PayPal interferes with tracking - so that would fall in the latter category.

What to do when something doesn’t track

If you have a missing transaction then we can take a manual claim for this. This takes longer than if something tracked normally but as long as another company/site is not already considered the referral agent and you completed the offer then we should be able to get it resolved successfully.

You can start the process for filing a missing transaction claim here:

Missing transaction enquiry form

!!—WINNERS–!!

Here are the lucky winners of the £10 bonus from Betfair!

anish32, bara03, bcorsie, bd4478, Big_Anth, billabongabing, chewyb11, cornishcat, curt1spar1s, dediana, deesieweesie, duncrieviedude, elayates, elkie59, freedavem, GRAEMEFRATER, gslocombe, gurmukh, heathen1981, highlorddave, igvod1886, ironmongem, jayden0606, jdd666, jezzery, jmankin, jnem, johaniversen, knarky, ksaddler, KSW2008, ladyrudden, Let475, licenced, loz1208, lwood, markhodges1975, martin24, mbge9al2, mbottomley, megaminx, michaelhibbs, milly2306, milocoon, minione, monkeytron, newnan55, nsweeney81, PasPer2, pennilessparent, pigginspring, Preston1990, priteshpatel16, rkenney, robscott, salako, sarahbridges, schofs, simonbrown50149, simonfrater, simonwarr, snappleton, soco1, StevenYoungs, summersnearlyhere, tgwebsolutions, thestokie, timmybrook, Trapperuk, trob, Vickypinklloyd, Vistrix, walt001, wavydave, Witchfinder1General, zanneone, cpaye, keithlbw, InnesL

Congrats to the winners! Funds will show as pending in the winners’ Quidco accounts, and will be paid when the Betfair transactions are validated (or for winners who need to submit untracked enquiries for Betfair, when the transaction amount is added after a successful enquiry.)

!!—EXPIRED–!!

The cashback rate has now dropped to £25 so we will be marking this blog as expired as that is now the standard Betfair rate. You can still go through and wager £10 on any event to get £25 Quidco cashback but the special £30 and £50 cashback is now over.

This promo has been huge and hopefully that will help us line up some more!! You can subscribe to the Quidblog with RSS or Email if you want to be notified whenever we post on here.

Please note if you had tracking problems and your Quidco cashback has not appeared please wait a few days to ensure it does not track in and then raise a manual request here: Manual enquiry form. This takes a bit longer as we have to have it manually checked by Betfair but as long as you went straight through Quidco to Betfair, fulfilled the wager terms, and did not alter the bet code or url we should be able to get it claimed for you.

ONE HOUR TO GO!! Fingers crossed everyone and GOOD LUCK from all of us at Quidco

Previous UPDATE!!!: Wow! This offer really exploded which means we’ve got good and bad news… The bad news is that demand was waaayyy higher than expected so we’ve blown the budget Betfair had (many many times over whoops!) and we need to lower the £50 cashback at 2400 tonight (April 4th). The good news is first of all that we all had a smoking offer to bring in the Grand National, but also that we still can offer £30 Quidco cashback for Betfair (until 1500 April 5 when it will drop) PLUS the random give-away of £400 has been doubled to £800 (£10 bonus for 80 lucky members).

In order to qualify for the £30 you must register for a new first-time account and wager £10 on the Grand National.

Good luck tomorrow! For the record we put our Betfair money on Comply Or Die, Slim Pickings, Chelsea Harbour, Mr Pointment, Kelami, Fundamentalist and Knowhere

END OF UPDATE

We have got a real no-brainer for the Grand National! While most bookies tighten up over these few days Betfair is putting a huge offer on the table to Quidco members - register with them and deposit and wager at least £10 and you will get £30 (was £50) Quidco cashback!* That’s no Slim Pickings! (ok we never said we’re good at puns )

If you are looking to put down a wager this is definitely a bit of a no-brainer! To make it even better and to have some fun we have been given a bonus £10 for 40 members to give away To get a chance for the bonus you’ll need to have a sign-up to Betfair tracked between now and 06/04/08 00:01 and leave a comment that says which horse/odds you put it on! We’ll then pick 40 members randomly from the eligible comments.

Betfair £30 cashback until midnight April 6th

Good luck everyone!

*Just as a quick note, we have had a few members report problems with tracking when using PayPal for the deposit, so we recommend using a credit card or bank account. If you do use a credit card, please make sure you deposit enough to cover the credit card fee as well as the £10 deposit. Last we checked, the fee was £0.25p. If you do use PayPal and have tracking problems, though, you can submit an enquiry for your transaction.