Cashback Services and the Way They Earn

Andrey Novoselov Andrey Novoselov
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Nowadays cashback services returning users a certain percentage of purchases in online stores are gaining wide popularity in the world. One of such services — Besmarty.ru (Runet) — has been successfully cooperating with the affiliate network Travelpayouts for more than a year and a half.

Cashback service lists more than 200 popular online stores and services that allow returning some part of your purchase’s price. Using BeSmarty, you can save on booking tickets and hotels, buying clothes, shoes, cosmetics, medicines, coupons, as well as on the delivery of food, flowers, gifts, etc. BeSmarty withdraws the amount earned to bank cards.

The service works directly with partners and affiliate networks. The interaction is simple and clear: Travelpayouts pays a commission to BeSmarty for each processed and paid order. This fee is shared with the user by transferring cashback. However, the user doesn’t receive the money immediately. First, cashback is transferred to the user’s virtual account, and can be withdrawn to the banking card only after the partner confirms the purchase. This is necessary to protect our service from fraudsters who make orders, receive cashback, and then cancel them.

Technically, the service works the following way:

  1. the user goes from Besmarty.ru to the website of its partner using a special referral link;
  2. the link contains an additional marker with a unique ID;
  3. Aviasales.ru (Aviasales, Hotelook) records this unique ID. When the user makes purchase, the system informs BeSmarty about the amount of the user’s purchase, to what ID this purchase belongs, and on the status of the purchase (approved, canceled, processing).

Notification is sent via special API. More information and documents are available in our help system.

Travel offers available in the cashback service website are highly demanded before summer holidays. People book hotels, buy airline tickets, rent cars and purchase travel insurances. The average bill per person in the «travel» category is quite high, so by booking hotels and tickets through BeSmarty, one can save much. For example, when you book a hotel for 2 weeks for $1022, BeSmarty returns $51. When you buy tickets for $438, you will be returned $5, by renting a car your savings will reach $73.

BeSmarty attracts traffic from various sources. This means cooperation with popular coupon websites whose target audience is used to spending money online, advertising in social media, PR articles, and cooperation with bloggers whose opinion is appreciated.

However, contextual advertising and SEO are still the most effective sources available now. In Western countries  cashback has been successfully operating for several years, but there are still less target queries in search engines. According to Adwords Keywords Tool, there were only 90,500 queries per month that contain the word «cashback» in Google, while the queries with the word «coupons» amounted to 550,000. Despite this, many people believe that cashback will gradually replace coupons, as it is much more interesting to get solid money instead of imaginary discounts.

You can do the same way and provide your visitors with points and bonuses, thus stimulating their interest in booking using your website.