People turn to online shopping for a variety of reasons, they find it convenient that the products that they purchase are delivered to their home or office door and they can avoid the trip to the store.
The amount of research that can be done online for a product is significantly higher than what we would be able to do by getting in our cars and driving around town hoping that their trusty sales associates will truly have our best interest at heart and recommend the right product or the best product and with honesty, tell us that they do not carry what we really need or want and that their competitor has it for cheap.
Many online shoppers think that finding the best online retailer that has their needed product for the best price is the end of their shopping quest and in many ways it is, however Internet retailers spend, sometimes considerable amounts of money, in advertising costs for TV, radio and print campaigns and they pay commissions to other web sites to send them traffic and customers in what is usually known as affiliate programs.
Since creating new customers is much more difficult and expensive for merchants than generating new purchases from an established customer base, they have devised a loyalty program where part of the commission costs that would normally fully go to the third party sites are paid as cash back to the actual customers.
As a customer, you receive a check once your commission from all your purchases from this consortium of merchants reach $25 dollars. The percentage cash back that is paid to the purchases varies from retailer to retailer and range from 1% to up to 25% of the purchase.
