In recent years, I’ve encountered a problem while shopping online. Here’s the issue: Whenever I attempt to buy something on the internet, my first step is to check the item’s reviews on sites like Reddit and niche forums. This method used to work well for me. However, in the last 5-7 years, I’ve observed that even Reddit’s reviews have become unreliable due to infiltration by shills and companies pushing their subpar products.
So, I started exploring other sites, but the problem worsened. If these sites weren’t filled with AI-generated content, they were often run by individuals attempting to earn commissions from Amazon. Their reviews were superficial and lacked neutrality and usefulness. This led me to an idea: If I’m facing this issue, surely others are too?
To address this problem, we need to diagnose it first. The core issue is that “reviewers” and retailers are essentially on the same side. While the reviewer may pretend otherwise, both parties ultimately want the sale, even if the product isn’t the right fit for the customer. This built-in conflict of interest makes online “reviewers” akin to car salespeople in a dealership.
Now that we’ve identified the problem, how can we solve it? One solution is to be independent from retailers, to be retailer-agnostic. Being independent allows us to be neutral, and neutrality gives us credibility, which can be monetized.
So, the idea I came up with is to create a discount club similar to Rakuten and Swagbucks, offering cash back services where customers are incentivized to make purchases and get rewarded simultaneously. Essentially, we’re adopting the tactic credit card companies use to generate profits. The more customers buy, the more fees and cash back are generated. Customers are happy because they receive rewards for every purchase and gain access to a platform with genuine, commission-free reviews.
My discount website will charge $19/year, and in return, members will receive trustworthy reviews on products they care about, a price tracker that scours the entire internet for the cheapest prices, and 1.5% cash back on purchases with limits.
The only challenge I need to address now is preventing customers from gaming the system — subscribing, making a purchase to get the 1.5% cash back, and then returning the item to essentially obtain free rewards. One potential solution is to enhance the value of my platform, making customers value their “good standing” in the club more than engaging in such shady behavior. I’d love to hear your thoughts or alternative solutions if you have any.
An approach that won’t work is creating affiliate accounts with retailers, as this would introduce a conflict of interest automatically. Additionally, most affiliate programs, including Amazon’s, prohibit offering features like finding the cheapest item from the internet, limiting the features I could provide to my subscribers.
You might be saying, ‘Hey, offering 1.5% cash back for purchases, isn’t that expensive?’ The answer is yes, but you have to remember that we need to view this from the perspective of a customer. For this platform to succeed, we must ensure that the customer is receiving more value than they are giving up; otherwise, they won’t care. Especially in the beginning when we are unknown and lack leverage (i.e., branding), customers have no reason to trust us over the competition. However, by providing our customers with high value from the start, these customers will be happy and more likely to spread the word, contributing to the growth of our website.
The 1.5% cash back will be limited to certain categories, much like credit cards do. We should always learn from the best in the game, and we’ll make sure our customers have tiers as well. If a particular customer is consistently buying a lot of products, not returning them, and is a good member, we’ll increase their reward to 3%, and we will also include some special gifts or free products on their birthdays and membership anniversaries. Conversely, if a particular customer exhibits the opposite behavior, we will consider limiting or banning them and refunding their subscription.
Let me know what you think — is this a bad idea, good, or just meh?
So bottom line is with credit cards I don’t pay anything to get cash back, the merchant is charged a fee and the cc companies come out way ahead in profit. At a 1.5% cash back rate (a pittance compared to credit cards), if you’re charging a $5/mo subscription I would need to buy $333 in products per month to come back out to zero and get the same value I would get from Wirecutter today. Your business would need me to buy less than that and be incentivized for me to buy few products, leaning your reviews negatively, to be profitable. You would also need a well-paid editorial staff and a large testing facility to buy and test hundreds of products for it to be a higher value than free sites like Wirecutter, requiring up-front capital and likely much more than a $5/mo subscription. I don’t see this working or being ‘neutral’. Additionally, neutrality is not the main hurt point of review sites for me, the main hurt point is not reviewing the products I am interested in or the use cases I want to use them for.
reading your outline - firstly i think you can look at quidco and topcashback - both offer 100% cashback where their affiliate commissions are passed as savings in the form of cashback to their members who pay a subscription.
regarding combatting uses who game the system, thats typically done by only paying out the cashback after affiliate commissions have been received, affiliate commissions are then only paid out after the transaction has been completed and past the refund period.
as someone who spent almost 20 years in digital marketing with a focus on performance marketing (i started my career in affiliate marketing, now work in VC), i can tell you that almost all cashback, voucher code, loyalty programs and comparison sites are affiliate sites.
your idea is to try to make the cashback reward paid to the customer unrelated (unaffiliated) with the brand they are purchasing from - not the first time i’ve encountered this proposition - you’ll face the following dilemmas -
- if the brand doesn’t pay the reward to the customer (for their unbiased review) who pays and why would they pay for it?
- how will get enough brands willing to be in your network?
- how will you get enough customers willing to be in your network?
- how will you get networked customers to actually post reviews and frequently enough?
- how will you ensure the reward to the customer exceeds the reward they might get elsewhere for less effort?
i think if you can resolve these dilemmas you will be able to progress.
People have readily identified this issue, whicb is why you have all sorts of ‘objective reviewers’ that disclose exactly what kickbacks they are getting if any, and sites like wirecutter, consumer reports, america test kitchen, etc. that also aim to provide fairly objective reviews with clarity on how and what they tested. I’m like you and obsessively research any purchase, but there are a few things to note about that. As you move up the scale of time spent researching, you are seeing fewer and fewer people doing that level of research, which limits your market reach immediately. Plenty of people don’t do a bunch of research and thus wouldn’t care. Also, starting so broad means that you are aiming to capture the full spectrum of consumers off the bat, but it’s going to take a while to get enough reviews to make it worthwhile for Joe Schmoe to fork up a fee to read what other experts think about the best Nikon DSLR budget zoom lens for birding photography… stuff gets niche real quick and there’s a critical mass that you need to reach to pull consumers over from existing resources. And in that vein, these consumers that research purchases obsessively online already have the sources for their interest. Yes, some of tbe major platforms are no longer reliable, but I still know the forums, experts, and search terms to use to research my birding needs. Multiply that by a thousand interests and you have quite the marketing hurdle to overcome. Final thought is that it would easy for a secondary site to basically copy your ratings for reviewers to check for free.
All to say, I think the idea has merit, but would be tough to start from scratch and jt may be worth starting with just one or two markets to grow organically before expanding.