For genuine friend-to-friend recommendations, I'd rather refer a friend of mine to make a purchase through Quidco and have them claim back the full referral fee themselves (minus a £5/year subscription), than pocket the referral fee myself.
If I was linking to a larger group, why should I go through Referly and not set up an affiliate account direct with the merchant? In the UK, at least, there are large networks like AffiliateWindow, CommissionJunction, etc. that allow you to sign up with numerous merchants using a single interface...
Seriously, this. I just checked my Quidco account - I've made £283.13 cashback via Quidco in the last two years. The vast bulk of that from big ticket purchases (e.g. flights, hotels) where I've remembered to log in to Quidco first.
By contrast, the amount of money I could make from recommending books, movies etc to friends via a Referly would be in the pennies.
To sum up: Quidco, I just remember to login before I buy a big ticket item, and literally make hundreds of pounds. Referly, I have to convert all of my product links to Referly affiliate links in the hope of making pennies.
They have a Firefox add-on too, which brings up a little bar at the top of the page when you visit one of their partners, advising you that you could earn cashback.
In the US, that would be mypoints.com -- or airlines, hotels, etc. have sites that allow you to earn miles when you shop through them. (American Airlines' is called https://www.aadvantageeshopping.com/ -- a truly horrible URL, but I have gotten many miles posted to my account from that site.) Mypoints gives you lower payouts but you can redeem them for all kinds of gift cards, etc. AA, et.al., give you higher payouts but of course they are in harder-to-redeem airline miles.
As far as I know, though, Amazon doesn't participate in any of these, as they don't like "middlemen" dealing with their affiliate program. Wonder if refer.ly will have similar issues down the road with Amazon.
For genuine friend-to-friend recommendations, I'd rather refer a friend of mine to make a purchase through Quidco and have them claim back the full referral fee themselves (minus a £5/year subscription), than pocket the referral fee myself.
If I was linking to a larger group, why should I go through Referly and not set up an affiliate account direct with the merchant? In the UK, at least, there are large networks like AffiliateWindow, CommissionJunction, etc. that allow you to sign up with numerous merchants using a single interface...