How Cashback Sites and Browser Extensions Actually Make You Money

"How is this free money?" is a completely fair question, and the honest answer is that it isn't free — it's a small slice of something retailers were already going to spend on marketing, redirected to you instead of to a billboard.

The short version

When you click through to a retailer from a voucher or cashback site, that click is tagged with a tracking reference. If you buy something, the retailer pays a commission to the network that sent you, out of their own marketing budget — the same budget they'd otherwise spend on adverts, sponsorships or influencer deals. A cashback site shares part of that commission with you. A pure voucher site (which is what we are) keeps the commission and doesn't share it directly, but it's the same mechanism underneath, which is why we're upfront about it in our affiliate disclosure.

Who's paying for this?

Not you, and not the retailer's other customers — crucially, the price at checkout doesn't change whether you came via a tracked link or typed the URL in directly. It comes out of a marketing spend the retailer had already budgeted, whether or not you personally used it.

Why cashback sometimes gets declined

This is the most common complaint, and it's almost never fraud on the cashback site's part. The usual culprits: an ad blocker or "enhanced privacy" browser setting stripped the tracking parameters before the click landed; you had another tab open with a different cashback or voucher extension that grabbed the click instead; or you returned part of the order, which reduces or cancels the commission the retailer pays out in the first place.

Extensions vs. clicking through manually

Extensions are more reliable simply because they can't forget to check — they'll flag a cashback offer automatically when you land on a supported retailer, where a manual click-through only works if you remember to start from the right site. The trade-off is that an extension sees every site you visit, so it's worth reading what data it actually collects before installing one.

A sensible way to use both

There's no reason to choose one over the other. Use us to find a code worth applying, click through properly, apply the code at checkout, and let a cashback extension pick up whatever commission is on offer on top. None of it requires you to pay anything upfront, and none of it should ever ask you to.