Quidco are offering 5% extra cashback on top, if you link your PayPal and Quidco accounts, and then pay for your retailer purchase (made via Quidco) using PayPal.

EDIT: It appears Quidco may be progressivly rolling this out slowly to customers. Check your account to see if you qualify yet. If not, keep checking back as they may add you.

It would be very easy to misread what they are offering here, indeed my first assumption was wrong!

(At first I had hoped this would be a cashback method whereby you did not need to visit Quidco in the first place, the tracking happing retrospectively from the payment. But this is not the case.)

You MUST still visit Quidco first, login, and then click out to the specific retailer.

My real erroneous assumption was that I assumed this would be a 5% bonus on your cashback amount. I.e. earn £1 in cashback get 5p extra. But it isn’t.

It is 5% extra on the cashback rate, based on the purchase amount (excluding delivery and VAT).

So if you made a purchase for £100, which would get you £2 cashback at 2%, you would also get £5 (5%) as well coming from the use of PayPal to pay.

It only applies to selected retailers, but this does include the likes of British Airways, Monarch, Hotels.com, Travelodge, flybe, Jet2, Qatar Airways, etc.

You can see the full list here: http://www.quidco.com/paypal-retailers/

Now they have remembered to require it to be a qualifying transaction type, so BA short haul (which is usually excluded from cashback outside of promotional periods) will still be excluded, sadly.

This is the page to link your accounts: https://www.quidco.com/settings/third-party-apps/

Other important matters:

• Do keep in mind if use travel (etc) insurance bundled with your credit card, and if the policy requires you to make payment on the card, you should check if it will cover payments via PayPal. Strictly speaking it is PayPal who will pay the merchant, you will pay PayPal … although PP is increasingly being integrated and moving into being a payments processor.
• Also, if you wish to rely upon standard credit (card) purchase protection insurance, it similarly might not apply.
• Now a positive, we know the best credit card points earning often comes from Amex cards, some merchants don’t accept amex, but do accept PayPal. And they may allow you to fund your payment to them via PayPal with an Amex (a merchant can stop this though depending upon their relationship and setup with PayPal).
• Finally don’t forget to check what TopCashBack are offering at the same time. While rates are normally close, with a temporary exclusive rate bonus running, things could be eclipsed.

Important note: Nothing in this post should be considered to be financial advice or financial services advice. It is a consumer discussion of cashback opportunities. As one user to another, remember cashback is never guaranteed