As you may know, my approach to when you get paid your cashback has been a little bit different from other sites. Merchants can take varying amounts of time to pay us the commission for your transactions (usually within 2-4 months but sometimes much longer). Historically, cashback sites didn't tell you when you were going to get your money; they just said "Once the merchant pays us, we'll update your statement", with perhaps a vague estimate of how long that might be.
I think I was the first (on a former site) to always give an estimated award date as soon as a transaction appeared on your statement. If the award date was reached, your transaction would normally change from pending to awarded provided one of the following conditions had been met:
- We'd received payment from the merchant OR
- The merchant had validated the transaction (i.e. unless they went bust, we were expecting to get paid at some point)
- The transaction was for a small amount
If none of the above applied, your transaction would change to "Extended" until it got validated/paid by the merchant.
So we were often paying cashback out to members before we got paid by the merchant.
To balance this, if we received payment from the merchant before the estimated award date (i.e. earlier than expected), our system would still make you wait until that date before your transaction got awarded. On balance, I thought this was a good approach because it gave people a good idea of when (in most cases) they'd get their money.However, things move on. I recognise that other sites pay out as soon as they get paid by the merchant, even if that means variable timescales. + I believe some also give estimated award dates now too. And there are fewer instances where imutual pays out before it gets paid, due to the inherent risk of non-payment.
So I've now decided that we're going to start awarding cashback as soon as we've verified that payment has been received from the merchant..
We've amended our system to make this happen for most merchants, and will implement it on the remaining ones as soon as is practicable.This was requested a while ago, and here I have to give credit to cashbacklover for persistence on this point
At the time, it wasn't something I thought we could do due to:- Lack of large number of members requesting it
- Development priorities
- Impact on cashflow
As our financial strength has grown, I'm now more comfortable about the final point. I'm also aware that other sites tend to work on this basis, and I don't want imutual to be seen as inferior in any way
It might take a little while for this new process to 'settle down' but for many of you this will mean receiving your cashback more quickly. Hope you like that
