PC World Drop Cashback Sites

Received an e-mail from PC World yesterday @ 16.15:

“PC World would like to thank you for all you hard work to date.

PC World has made the decision to withdraw working with Cashback & Loyalty sites. We want to make sure our consumers are clear on our prices. We have web exclusive deals and in store prices, adding additional cashback etc has caused some customer service issues.

We are working closely with our brand teams to bring cashback and loyalty sites back onto the program in the future. So please look out for upcoming announcements to the program.

This will be effective as of Friday 23rd February.

Once again thanks for your support and we look forward to working with you again shortly.”

Thanks for the notice. Have been speaking to a fellow cashback site employee, who infact made contact with me over this issue. How many times have we seen this before, on other networks, with other programs? Fair enough there may have been problems with the activity on the program, however nothing was discussed with either of us and whats more providing us with 8 hours notice to remove links, offers, creatives and provide an explanation to users is not good enough.

Where is the harm in calling top cashback sites into a meeting, where problems such as this can be discussed? As has been said many many times before ‘this industry is based on relationships’ - why are reputable cashback sites subjected to such poor communication, and ultimately a decreasing relationship with merchants? There has been no improvement over a long period of time, and something needs to be done.