grooveDexter's Blog

Yesterday at 10am PST (1pm EST) Blastoffnetwork launched for free public use.  The site is a social network built on the concepts of Facebook and Myspace, but it offers much more to it’s members.  Members who join in on the site are given a number of features, but the most prominent is the “Cashback,” similar to the cash back rates of Bing or Fatwallet.

I’ve been a big fan of Bing (Microsoft) cashback ever since discovering it and saving 30% on some of my ebay purchases, so I’m excited to find out that Blast Off offers the same thing.  Blast Off has partnered up with 300+ retail stores across the United States in order to be able to offer it’s members a percentage of money back for stores they normally would shop at anyway.

Members who sign up are directed to the websites of their selected retailer through the Blast Off mall page, a tracking cookie follows their browser and ensures that the referral key isn’t lost.

So what is “cash back” exactly? 
Each time you visit a store through a Blast Off link and then buy something, Blast Off is paid a referral fee.  With the system that is set up, Blast Off will pay you back a percentage of those earnings.  Typically the cash back runs at an average of 4% of your purchase, but there are some that go up to 40%, as well as the occasional “super deal.”

What else is there to BlastOff?
One of the coolest things and my favorite personally, Is that even though the service is completely free, you can still get paid for referring people to try it.  This is really where Bing falls into second place.  Once you create a page for your own personal shopping, you can then invite other people to visit your page and sign up.  Then whenever someone that you invited buys something Blast Off will send you an additional % of cash back from their purchase, out of Blast Off’s own pockets.  So to reiterate, friends get the same cash back that you do even though you invited them and are now getting a small % of cash back from all purchases they make.

Okay that was a mouthful, and I would probably be a little skeptical, but it was also reported Pizza Hut will be getting involved with direct marketing of the service via pizza box-tops.  Finally I’ve confirmed Blast Off is free to use, and after investigating I found all of the sites you make purchases on to be the actual third party sites of major retailers.  All the money made is simply from “refer a friend” commission.

To check it out visit http://my.blastoffnetwork.com/subscribe [via blastoffnetwork.com]