I have just had a chance to test drive MoneyBackCo, who tagged themselves as “Australia’s Moneyback Community”. It is basically a “cashback” site, where they give you back the commissions from the affiliation sales, just like Buckscoop and OzRewardS which I have previously reviewed (as well as the biggest in Australia, EmailCash, which I haven’t written about).

However, what sets MoneyBackCo apart is, instead of taking a chunk of commission and giving back to you the rest (50% in the case of Buckscoop and a bit less in the case of OzRewardS, depending on the merchant), their business strategy is actually giving back 100% of the commission to their users! For example, if you are getting this Palm Tungsten E2 for $279 from Deals Direct, you’ll get back

• $13.95 from MoneyBackCo (5%)
• $6.98 from Buckscoop (2.5%)
• $5.58 from OzRewardS (2%)

Pretty cool, isn’t it? However, there are fee associated with using this service, which includes

• $10/year membership (deducted from your cashback)
• 2% withdrawal fee when you want to cash out, but they are working on eliminating it

The community aspect is, they don’t care how much you benefit from this service — whether it is $10 or $1000. You just pay your membership fee, and then can claim as much as possible from their 100% cashback schemes. But then issue is, if they are running as a company and are aiming to maximise the profit, they can only do so by increase number of memberships, and they won’t necessarily try to encourage a sale or other follow up process. Just like your local RSL club/community :)

I have a brief test and it looks like they are using CommissionMonster to get the commissions, and on their merchants page they are listing over 500 shops where you can get moneyback from.

Now, there is a big problem. They are still in beta, and the website has that “under construction” smell all over the place. Their webserver is in Houston TX, and the “secure” part of their service is not even secured by HTTPS!

So here is the request. MoneyBackCo’s founder, Steve, is requesting some beta testers, who would like to sign up an account, play around, and provide them with some feedback to iron out remaining issues. In return, MoneyBackCo will waive the first year membership fee ($10).

I think account approval is currently manually processed as there’s a limited number of testing accounts available (mine was activated after a few hours). So if you are interested in this 100% cashback service, head down there and sign up an account before the next time you shop online.