How It Works
Step 1: Sign Up With A Network (You can follow any of the image links at the sides of our pages, or there are lists of the best recommended Networks to be found in the 'Gifts' and 'Networks & Offers' pages).
Step 2: Complete One Offer ('Offers' are advertisements hosted by the Network and require registration with a company such as Lovefilm or Coral Betting and range in price from completely free trials to around £5 or £10. But you only need to complete one, so choose a free one!)
Step 3: Refer Friends To Do The Same
Step 4: Trade Referrals For Gifts!
The first thing many people think when they hear about 'Free Gift Network' websites is that it must be too good to be true, surely no-one in their right mind would give away gifts worth hundreds of pounds for nothing? Well technically they're not. The gifts do get paid for, just not by you!
The History Of Referral Rewards:
The idea of loyalty / referral reward in business has been around for a while now, you may have encountered it before if you've ever used online gambling websites to play poker or bingo. These sites offer a small bonus for every person you refer to them who signs up. This usually occurs in the form of a small cash bonus (of around £10 or so) to play with for every referral brought.
They give this to you because you've brought them a new customer whom they hope in the long run will continue to play their games and bring in extra revenue. Now the limit to this kind of reward is that the bonus is restricted to being £10 of play money within the site every time you refer, you can't save up the bonuses from multiple referrals and then spend them on products outside of the gaming site.
Luckily for us this is exactly where the Free Gift Networks come in.
How The Free Gift Networks Use Refferals:
The Networks host linked advertisements from a range of different companies called 'Offers' (you can find more in-depth discussion of the offers available in the 'Networks & Offers' page of this site), which require you to follow the link to the offer company, sign-up, and fulfill one other requirement such as recieve at least 1 DVD on the Free Trial with Lovefilm, or deposit and bet £5 in the case of Coral Betting.
You must complete one offer yourself to become eligible to recieve free gifts from the network, and once you have done that you don't need to complete any more offers yourself, just refer friends to, and if you've chosen the Lovefilm Free Trial then the offer hasn't cost you anything either!
Now, using your unique referral code you can refer friends to the network, and for every one of them that successfully completes an offer the network gets paid the bonus for the new customer (around £25) and you get 1 referral credited to your account. You can save these up and exchange them for gifts of varying values, see the table below for gift / referral rates:
As you can see from the table, for 3 completed referrals from you, the network would recieve between £75 in 'bonuses' from the offer companies (at an average of around £25 per referral). If you then traded in those 3 referrals for a 4GB iPod Shuffle worth £60 from Amazon.co.uk, the networks have recieved enough money to both pay for your gift, and make about £15 profit, so everybody's been paid.
Other Notes
The reason we have mentioned the Amazon price in the table and the example above is because the Networks buy their gifts per order from Amazon.co.uk (or .com in the USA or equivalent online retailer in other parts of the world - see the 'FAQ' for the full list of available regions). The networks don't hold stock of their own as newer models of gifts can change rapidly and they only need to buy gifts on a per user basis as that particular person acquires the neccessary amount of referrals for their gift. Also Amazon is one of the few shopping sites that allows items to be shipped to a different address than the card billing address, this saves the hassle of the network owners having to recieve every item and then forward it on themselves, quite a problem considering that most networks operate transatlantically!
It's worth mentioning now that, although the offer companies hope that you and your referrals will stay on as customers and continue to spend money with them (and thus make their £25 payment to the network worthwhile), there is absolutely no obligation to do so. So if you had chosen to complete the £5 bet on Coral offer, you never have to put any more money into your account ever again and you can continue to recieve gifts from the network.
We hope that this section has proved informative and useful in helping you understand the way in which the free gift networks operate, and if you feel that we have been unclear about any part of the process you might find further answers in the 'FAQ', or feel free to e-mail us via the 'Contact' page. There are also extra proof links to be found in the 'Links' section of this website, featuring news reports from the BBC, and magazine articles about the Free Gift Network scene.
Continue to the 'Networks and Offers' page.
