Quick Links: ▶︎ Who Are Complete Savings? ▶︎ So, what is Complete Savings, and how does it work? ▶︎ How do I earn the cashback on an online purchase? ▶︎ Signing Up Bonus & Getting Your Membership Fee Back Every Month ▶︎ What if you change your mind? ▶︎ Top reasons to join Complete Savings ▶︎ Why Pay to Join a Cashback App? ▶︎ Pros of Joining Complete Savings ▶︎ Negatives of Joining Complete Savings ▶︎ How to join Complete Savings ▶︎ My Personal view on Complete Savings - Is it worth it?
An overview of how Complete Savings works, along with the pros and cons of joining this subscription cashback app
The Complete Savings cashback service may not be a cashback service that comes to mind as a way to earn cashback on your everyday purchases; in fact, you may not have even heard of them! When they were mentioned to me, I'll admit to not having a clue who they were, however, once I looked into them, I soon realised that I'd seen them pop up on my screen many times and just hadn't thought anything of it. Honestly, I've realised I've been missing out!
Who Are Complete Savings?
Complete Savings is a membership-based cashback program that offers several ways to earn money back on purchases. You'll probably have come across them without knowing it when you made a qualifying purchase from one of the Complete Savings online retailer partners.
You'll likely have seen a box come up on your screen just after finalising your order that looks something like this:
The advert offers you money back on your purchases by signing up for their subscription service/online membership programme for £18 per month. Now, it's entirely possible that, like me, you've looked at the advert and thought there's no way I'm signing up for a subscription service for £18 a month to get money back on the order you just placed. It's understandable, but knowing what I know now, I wish I had done it sooner!
So, what is Complete Savings, and how does it work?
Compete Savings is a cashback service similar to TopCashback and Quidco; the big difference is that Complete Savings charges you an £18 monthly subscription fee to earn cashback from them. Now, as off-putting as that might sound, it’s really not, as you can easily get your monthly subscription fee back every month, by way of a monthly bonus, and earn some decent cashback!
The cashback rate for being part of the subscription service is higher, often much higher than that of the cashback service competitors. The service guarantees a minimum cashback of 10% on purchases made via its service. You can earn at least 10% cashback on eligible purchases from a wide range of retailers every time you make a purchase with many top-name retailers via the Complete Savings website.
Members can earn up to 10% cashback, sometimes more, on purchases made through the Complete Savings network, and can earn up to £250 Cashback on their online shopping every month from over 1000 retailers, including brands such as:
AO, Appleyard, Argos, Adidas, Asos, Asda, Beelivery, Deliveroo, Coop, Domino's, Schuh, Dunelm, Evri, Fortnum & Mason, Graze, Greenchef, Homebase, Habitat, Iceland, Justeat, Lakeland, Lindt, Ninja, Ocado, Pizza Hut, Poundland, Premier Inn, The Range, Robert Dyas, Sainsbury's, Savers, Studio, Temu, Tesco, Toolstation, Ubereats, Wayfair, Wickes, Morrisons, Thorntons and many many more!
Personally, I think that earning 10% cashback on a supermarket shop makes the subscription charge worth every penny! Now, I will state here that there are some limitations on products allowed to earn cashback from Tesco, which does limit the cashback at this retailer. Morrisons and Asda are only for the first purchase made by the Complete Savings website; however, the other supermarkets seem unlimited.
There are enough every day retailers on the site that someone might well use over the month to earn back the initial monthly investment in joining Complete Savings, making it worthwhile to be a member.
I purchased some new shoes from the Schuh website, costing me £75.00. I went through Complete Savings and earned 10% cashback, which is £7.50 back on my purchase. Had I gone through TopCashback or Quidco, I would have received 3.3% cashback, the equivalent of £2.48 cashback. So, I was £5 better off going through Complete Savings. Plus, I’ll not have to wait as long to receive my cashback in my bank, which is great!
I also spent £12.97 at eBay and got 10% back on that purchase. However, TopCashback was only offering 1%, and Quidco wasn’t offering any cashback for the type of product I purchased. So, using Complete Savings earned me £1.29 cashback over the 13p I would have got from TopCashback. So, the cashback can soon add up even on these smaller purchases!
Signing Up Bonus & Getting Your Monthly Bonus Every Month
Welcome Reward: To sign up to Complete Savings, click on the one in the adverts you see when purchasing something on a retailer's website. Signing up via the link and making a further purchase with that same retail partner will mean you can claim back, as a cashback initial welcome reward, the amount shown to you in the advert, which is a nice little bonus!
To do this, make another purchase (it needs to be the same retailer you signed up with, so if you signed up via eBay, you need to make a 2nd eBay purchase, which can be of any value) and go to your Complete Savings account, and from the benefits tab, you’ll see the Welcome Reward option, If you go to that and enter the retailer you’ve bought from, the order number and the amount you spent, and then attach a copy of the receipt and click on the submit button. That will send the reward information to Complete Savings, and they’ll then process the claim and you'll recieve your welcome reward bonus into your account within 10 days.
Monthly Membership Fee Monthly Bonus : So, you’ve got your initial transaction payment back, and you still need to pay £18 per month for your subscription, but the good news is that you can easily earn a monthly bonus amount that can contribute towards evening out the cost of the monthly fee for your monthly subscription charge every month!
You can claim a monthly bonus, that equals your £18 subscription charge, meaning that as long as you request your bonus every month, you can, essentially, use the service for free as you are able to claim a £18 bonus!
To claim your monthly £18 bonus, you need to make a purchase from the Complete Savings Programme retailer you signed up with. So if you signed up via Ebay, you need to make a purchase from Ebay every month. You'll then be able to claim your monthly bonus by filling out a form on your Complete savings profile, which takes just a minute to do.
There is no minimum spend amount to claim your £18 bonus every month, so you could buy anything you like, even something for £1 on eBay, for example, and you’ll be able to claim your £18 bonus!
To claim your monthly bonus, you need to go to your account, and you’ll see a tab for earnings. When you click on the earnings tab, you’ll see the monthly bonus option, and all you need to do is to fill out the short form, in which you type in the retailer you bought from, the receipt number and the amount spent. You then attach a copy of your order confirmation email and click submit. Complete Savings will then process your bonus and it'll be added to your earnings account.
How do I earn the cashback on an online purchase?
In the same way as TopCashback and Quidco, you need to go to the cashback site's website, find the retailer you want to buy from, and click on the link to the retailer’s page. This will take you to the retailer, where you interact with the website as usual and place your order.
Complete Savings will track your transaction, and the cashback amount will show as pending in your cashback account for about 30 days, sometimes sooner, then once the cashback has cleared into your account balance and once your cashback account reaches the minimum £5 withdrawal amount, you can request that payment to go to your bank account, which arrives in just a few business days, (you enter your bank account details when you sign up)
Below, you'll be able to see how Complete Savings shows your pending purchases/transactions on your account:
Below, you can see an example of how the cashback that’s being sent to you is reported. It shows how quickly that cashback comes back to you after you make your purchase! I received my cashback the same day as the payment was sent.
The nice thing with this is how much faster the cashback clears into your cashback account than that of its rivals, which can take months to become payable! The only reason the cashback takes up to a month to clear is that often the retailers require a 30-day grace period before paying the cashback due to the retailers having a 30-day return policy, so they wait until that return policy has expired before paying, as they don't want to have paid you out cashback for you to return the goods then, as they're they are then out of pocket, and this is especially relevant when the cashback is 10%, as if you spent a chunk of money at Argos or Currys on a new telly, for example, the cashback amount could be significant!
That said, several of my transactions that I was expecting to take 30 days to clear, went through in 10 days, and having spoken to Complete Savings, I've been told that if I then return something, I've been paid the cashback for already, they'll simply take it off the next cashback payment, and that is exactly what happened to me when I returned something I had bought to the retailer and they issued me a refund. The cashback refund showed as a minus on my account until I had earned enough new cashback to cover that minus, so very simple
Travel companies generally won't pay out until you take the trip/have stayed at the hotel, again for the same reason, as say you've spent a grand with Hotels.com and earned 11% cashback (correct rate at time of writing this post but liable to change), you earned £110 cashback and if they pay you before you go and you then cancel the trip, Hotels.com are out of pocket by £110, so they wait until you’ve taken the trip before paying out (as do all the other cashback sites too!).
I'm gutted that I didn't discover this site earlier. We recently spent £500 on hotels for our honeymoon and got 2% cashback from another cashback site, so £10 cashback, but through this cashback site, I would have got £55 cashback, so I really missed out there. However, we booked another hotel stay for an extra night, paid £126.79 for the room, and got 11% cashback via Complete Savings, earning us £13.94 cashback, which is great!
What if you change your mind?
If you decide the service isn’t for you, it’s not difficult to cancel. Initially, you'll get a 30-day free trial of the service anyway, which gives you time to test drive the service and earn cashback at no charge to yourself. You do need to enter your credit/debit card details during sign-up, as this is a subscription service. However, you'll not be charged for a month. You can cancel during the trial, at any point, via phone, emailing the customer service team or using the chatbot on the website. If you cancel part way during a month, you'll still get to use the service until the end of the month.
Top reasons to join Complete Savings
1. Joining Reward: Members receive a cashback reward upon joining and making their first online order purchase, which is a decent joining bonus!
2. Monthly Bonus: Members can earn an extra monthly cash back bonus by purchasing with a participating retailer and uploading the receipt.
3. Money off high street gift cards: Members can get up to 20% discount off gift cards for many top high street brands. Complete Savings offers two different gift card options: the Top Offers option and the Everyday option. The Top offers option offers some specially selected retailer gift cards for a 20% discount. At the time of writing this post, you could get 20% off Argos, New Look and One4 All e-gift cards (so the digital gift cards rather than a physical card), and 20% off New Look and River Island physical gift cards. This is a whopping saving when compared to rival gift card retailer offerings!
Every day gift cards offer a much larger selection of retailers where you can get a discount on the gift cards from. You'll get a competitive discount on a wide range of retailer gift cards. Needless to say, it's always worth checking out what all the other gift card cashback services are offering, as rates can change often!
How does the Complete Savings gift card discount scheme work?
Saving money on gift cards from Complete Savings works differently from most of other gift card cashback sites you might use.
Rather than receiving cashback on a purchase you make, you'll receive a discount on the upfront cost of the gift card, (The discount is applied at the point of purchase for the gift cards).
For example, if you buy a £100 gift card with a 20% discount, you’ll only pay £80 to receive the card, so you don't need to wait for cashback to hit your cashback account as you've already been given a discount off the cost of the gift card when you checkout!
Every calendar month, you can purchase Gift Cards up to a value of £100 from the 'Top Offers' section of the gift card website and an additional £100 worth of Gift Cards from the rest of the gift card retailers.
4. In-Store Cashback: You don't just have the opportunity to earn cashback from online stores; members can earn cashback on in-store purchases by linking their credit cards and activating offers with participating merchants.
5. Discount Codes: The site offers a range of discounts for specific retailers that work alongside the cashback. This means you can use the special advertised discount code on the retailer’s site to save money and still earn cashback on the purchase as well, so that’s a decent deal stack!
6. Online Cashback: Earn at least 10% cashback from over 1,000 online retailers, maximising your cashback opportunities to save money. At 10% cashback, you’ll often find the rates on Complete Savings to be better than many of its rivals!
Why Pay to Join a Cashback App?
Paying to join a cashback app like Complete Savings can be worthwhile for frequent online shoppers who can maximise the benefits offered. The monthly fee (£18) can be offset by the cashback earned, especially if members take full advantage of the program's features!
Ordinarily, I wouldn't consider subscription services a great idea, no matter the type! I avoid subscriptions at all costs unless I really need or like the service; I'm a money-saving expert, after all, so it makes sense that I would be anti-subscription services as they cost money; however, that said, Complete Savings is a bit different!
You can easily earn your monthly bonus, which equals your subscription cost every month, meaning you don't actually pay for using the site as long as you remeber to claim your bonus every month, but you can earn cashback in various ways, turning a potential expense into an income source. That's got to be a good thing!
Did You Know: Cashback is tax-free for personal use (not business purchases), so you don't need to declare your cashback income to the HMRC!
TopCashback and Quidco charge an annual fee for using their premium services, and you can't claim a monthly bonus, equal to the membership fees, unlike Complete Savings, so actually, people using these other services premium services are paying a subscription anyway; it's just not paid for monthly via a separate payment from your debit/credit card; and so claim the monthly membership fee back every month from Complete Savings, and you'll then be paying less per year than the TopCashback & Quidco premium services account fees!
Pros of Joining Complete Savings
1. Potential for significant savings: Regular shoppers can earn substantial cashback, potentially exceeding the monthly fee (which can be claimed back anyway), and the rates are often higher than Complete Savings main competitors
2. Variety of earning options: Members can earn cashback via the following ways, including online shopping, gift card purchases, and in-store offers
3. Wide network of retailers: With over 1,000 top-name retailers, members have many opportunities to earn cashback from a wide range of participating retailers.
4. Fast payments: Cashback is quickly paid into the member's bank account once the balance reaches £5 and the member requests the cashback, so no waiting around for ages for your money!
Negatives of Joining Complete Savings
1. Monthly fee: The £18 monthly payment may not be worthwhile for infrequent shoppers or those who don't maximise the program's benefits. If you claim your monthly bonus , its the equivalent of getting back your monthly fee every month, so you can't go wrong—if you forget, you’re down £18, but I’ve set up a calendar alert to remind me to make my purchase and claim my monthly bonus, so it’s nice and easy.
2. Gift card purchases don't count: You can't earn cashback on online purchases made by gift card. So if you make a purchase from Argos, as an example, having clicked through to the retailer via Complete Savings, and then pay for your order via gift card, you won't be awarded any cashback from Complete Savings (nor the other cashback services, to be fair!), .
This is because many people, including myself, use gift card cashback sites to buy a gift card and are rewarded cashback for doing so, and you can't deal stack two types of cashback for the same purpose, so you need to work out which offer is best; Is the gift card cashback best, and if so, use the gift card cashback site, if the Complete Savings rate is better, use Complete Savings!
You may find that purchases you've paid for with a retailer, by your debit/credit card, via Complete Savings might deal stack if automatic cashback services notice the transactions, and you could earn extra cashback; it's happened to me, and it was sizeable extra cashback amount!!
As Complete Savings offers competitively priced gift cards, you’ll likely still be saving money buying a gift card from them anyway, plus with the Top Offers deals offering a whopping 20% cashback on selected brands (up to the value of £100 per month), you could well be making a bigger saving than even the generous 10% cashback you’d get buying without a gift card via Complete Savings!
3. Check the terms and conditions: Some retailers have specific clauses regarding which products are eligible for cashback, so always check that important information to ensure that the retailer will pay you cashback on the products you want to buy. This isn’t necessarily any different from other cashback sites, which will have specific terms and conditions as well, and these terms and conditions are normally set by the retailers rather than the Cashback apps as they’ll have certain products or services that they don’t want, aren’t allowed, or can’t afford to offer cashback on, and the cashback apps have to make sure they adhere to these requirements.
4. Limited gift card purchases: Members can only purchase up to £200 worth of gift cards per month (£100 from Top Offers and £100 from the regular range), unlike other gift card cashback retailers. However, £200 worth of gift cards is still a decent amount, and you're likely to get a better cashback rate not using the gift cards anyway if buying online through Complete Savings, as per the information in point number 2.
5. Tracking issues: As with many cashback programs, there may be occasional issues with tracking purchases and crediting cashback. If this happens, contact Compete Savings customer services, and they'll sort it out for you!
How to join Complete Savings
There aren't any referral links or other ways to join Complete Savings; you do need to look out for the advert on the pages of participating retailers to be able to sign up. If you go to eBay and look at an old order, the advert is still showing up, so you could use that if it's there! Once you get signed up, you will have a 30-day free trial to test the service out, so make good use of it and earn some decent cashback! If you don't want to continue using the service, cancel before the trial ends so you don't get charged for the next month’s service.
Realistically, if you ensure you claim your subscription fee back every month and make use of the retailers on the service, I can't see why you wouldn't want to use Complete Savings as your go-to cashback service of choice.
My Personal view on Complete Savings - Is it worth it?
I'll hold my hands up and say I was sceptical, initially, of the service. Did I really think that a subscription cashback service was the right for me? Honestly, no, but I'll hold my hands up and say that I'm honestly loving Complete Savings!
The 10% minimum cashback rate is great, and it generally wipes the floor with Quidco and TopCashback rates, and since I joined Complete Savings, I have only used TopCashback once, and that's because the retailer wasn't on the Complete Savings platform!
I've used Complete Savings several times now, and you can see from the outstanding transactions list further up on this post (It's expanded since adding the list, as I've used it since!), and it's really working for me!
Being able to claim back the membership fee every month is the key point of this service for me, as not actually having had to pay the membership fee, (once you've claimed your membership fee back), and still being able to access the great cashback rates is really good and is the reason that I'll genuinely be using Complete Savings as and when possible, when making a purchase, the cashback rates are so good that I'll struggle to find a reason to use my 'usual' cashback services; why earn less?!
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