Cashback and loyalty publishers such as ShopBack and Cashrewards give members a percentage of spend back for shopping through the platform. They can drive genuine incremental volume during key campaigns, or quietly cannibalise sales you would have made anyway. Run it deliberately and it is a real channel, not an unnoticed cost.
01What are cashback and loyalty publishers, actually?
Cashback and loyalty publishers are affiliate partners built around a rewards model rather than content or comparison. ShopBack and Cashrewards are the two largest in the Australian market. A member browses the platform, clicks through to your store via their tracked link, buys as normal, and later receives a percentage of that spend back as cash or points. Your business pays commission on the sale, same as any other affiliate partner – the publisher then shares part of that commission with the member as the reward.
The member relationship is the whole model. People join ShopBack or Cashrewards specifically to get money back on purchases they were already planning to make, and a smaller group actively shop around the platform looking for offers worth chasing. Both behaviours exist in the same member base, in different proportions depending on category – which is exactly why this channel needs judgement rather than a blanket policy.
02What do cashback and loyalty publishers want from your brand?
A commission rate worth promoting, a genuinely good offer, and – often – paid placement on top. Cashback platforms are competing with each other for member attention, so they favour brands that give their members a reason to click: a decent cashback percentage, a real discount or bundle, or both together. A rate that only just clears the platform's minimum threshold gets buried; a rate with a story behind it gets featured.
Paid placement is the layer above standard commission – a homepage slot, a category takeover, inclusion in a sale-period email to their member base. It is a separate commercial decision from the ongoing commission structure, and it should be treated as one: judged on the specific visibility being purchased and the audience overlap with your customers, not accepted by default because a publisher asked for it.
- Commission that is worth featuring – competitive against what similar brands in your category are running, not just against your own margin comfort.
- An offer with substance – cashback stacked on a genuinely good deal outperforms cashback alone.
- Reliable tracking and fast validation – members lose trust in a platform that pays out cashback late or inconsistently, and that trust problem becomes your problem too.
- A reason to feature you during key periods – boosted rates, exclusive offers or early access around EOFY and Black Friday.
03When does cashback add genuine sales, and when does it cannibalise?
It adds genuine sales when it reaches members who were comparing options and the cashback offer tips the decision your way, or when it supports a campaign you were already running and extends its reach. It cannibalises when existing, already-loyal customers route a purchase they were going to make anyway through the cashback link purely to collect the reward – and you end up paying commission on demand you already owned.
Both things happen inside the same channel, often in the same month. The honest starting point is accepting that cashback will never be 100% incremental – no affiliate channel is – and the real question is whether the mix leans toward genuine new volume or toward existing customers claiming a discount on spend that did not need incentivising.
The signal to watch is new-versus-existing customer mix on cashback traffic specifically, not blended across the whole store. If cashback-attributed sales skew heavily toward customers who have bought from you multiple times before, that is cannibalisation showing up in the data. If the mix includes a meaningful share of first-time buyers, the channel is doing its job. Order value against your normal baseline is worth checking too – a cashback sale sitting well below typical average order value can be a sign the platform is mostly catching bargain-hunters rather than adding new demand.
None of this means avoid cashback. It means run it with eyes open, watch the mix, and be willing to pull back on a specific publisher relationship if the numbers say it is mostly funding existing customers rather than winning new ones.
Cashback can be great, but only if you know why you are using it.
04How do boosted rates and key sale periods work?
A boosted rate is a temporary commission increase offered to a cashback or loyalty publisher, usually timed to a major trading period – end of financial year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or a category-specific sale push. In exchange, the platform features your brand more prominently: a better placement, inclusion in a promotional email, or a higher cashback percentage shown to members during that window.
Used well, boosted rates concentrate spend where it matters – you pay more for a short, defined period in exchange for real extra visibility during your highest-intent trading days. Used carelessly, a permanently boosted rate trains members to expect it as the baseline and erodes the case for using cashback at all, because the "special" rate stops being special.
- 01
Pick genuine key periods
EOFY, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and any major campaign specific to your business – not every month with a sale banner.
- 02
Agree the increase and the placement together
A boosted rate without a corresponding placement commitment from the publisher is just a discount you gave away.
- 03
Set a defined start and end date
Boosted rates should revert automatically. An open-ended increase becomes the new normal rate by default.
- 04
Review performance against the baseline period
Compare volume and new-customer mix during the boosted window against a normal month, not just against the spend.
05How should you run cashback and loyalty publishers deliberately?
Treat the channel as a decision, not a default. Set the standard commission at a rate worth featuring, decide in advance which periods earn a boosted rate, and check the new-versus-existing customer mix regularly enough to catch cannibalisation before it becomes the normal state of the relationship. Deliberate management is the difference between cashback as a genuine growth lever and cashback as a line item nobody is watching.
The commission decision underneath all of this connects directly to your wider commission strategy – what you can afford to pay cashback and loyalty publishers depends on margin, category and how aggressive your general affiliate commission structure already is. It is worth setting that baseline first, then layering cashback tactics on top of it rather than the other way around.