Cashloop’s motto, “it pays to shop online”, pretty much reflects its business model — it is (yet another) cashback/moneyback/reward website that gives back a part of its affiliate commission to its members. When you enter into online retailer’s websites via these guys, an affiliation cookie will be installed on your web browser, so that any purchase will be tracked, transactions recorded, and you can get a percentage of the transaction amount as cashback.

We have actually looked at quite a few reward websites before — OzRewardS, BuckScoop and MoneyBackCo, although I have yet to write a review on the biggest one site in the country, EmailCash. Except for EmailCash with its ever-so-confusing currency system, they all pretty much work the same. Is Cashloop any different?

Well, let me look at the things I like and don’t like about this new reward service.

Good

• Definitely one of the better looking one of the bunch. Clean design. Very readable text. Easy to use navigation. It certainly makes finding the shop you are after easier. Nice.
• Before end of July, you can get 50% extra cashback! That means, if a shop usually offers 5% cashback, you can get 7.5% before 31^st of July!
• It is coded in Java. Yes I know it is no longer an “in” language unlike 10 years ago, but it still feels heaps better than other “scripting languages” like PHP (BuckScoop, OzRewardS, MoneyBackCo) and ASP/VB (EmailCash).

Bad

• Even with 50% bonus cashback, its cashback rate is still no match of MoneyBackCo’s. Just compare it with the rate offered by MBC, I think it is giving out around 75% the commission back at the moment, and 50% after July.
• They are very new — only started in April 2007.
• Does not offer any merchants from DGM-AU — only clixGalore and CommissionMonster are offered.

Ugly

• What is all this “100 points = 1 Australian Dollar” crap? Just show me the dollar sign and nothing else! (One thing that I really dislike about EmailCash)
• I cannot get the email/account verification to work! After I paste in the URL to verify my account, the site would say “whoops! An internal error occurred. Administrators have been notified by email. Apologies for any inconvinience. (sic)” — until I clear out all the session cookies. Maybe it should not have been coded in Java in the first place. Due to the outage, I am unable to test any functionality. Maybe next time.

Well, I guess Cashloop is not that much different from all its peers I guess. This cashback/reward space is certainly getting a bit packed. Competition should encourage innovation I hope, and it is the keen shoppers that benefit at the end.

As a consumer, it is also a good idea to stick with one reward program because you usually need to accumulate a fixed amount of credit before you can cash out. You don’t want to try them all and have cash credits and points scattered everywhere, but the amount is never large enough to change to real $$ in your bank account.

Update: Thanks to Luke from Cashloop for fixing up my account.