What TopCashback learned from India, a blocked deal and tracking threats, with Mike Tomkins

TopCashback was founded in 2005 by two computer programmers and is now a well-known UK cashback site. In this Lessons from Losing episode, Awin's interviewer talks to co-founder Mike Tomkins, who looks back on 21 years of the business. He covers an overseas flop, a blocked deal and tracking changes.

In this episode

• Tomkins and his partner started with travel comparison sites that depended on Google rankings, then built a member base and passed all commission back to members, earning money from brand placements in the newsletter instead (3:31, 4:30, 5:01).

• The India site launched around 2012 and lost money until 2020. He calls it an expensive lesson: it shared a code base with the UK site and the market jumped to a few large retailers (7:01, 7:30, 8:30, 10:00).

• Apple's intelligent tracking prevention and cookie consent refusals threatened sale tracking; he says a colleague led work with the ICO, which now calls cashback cookies strictly necessary (11:30, 12:00, 12:30).

• He advises watching a competitor's new idea for six months or a year before copying it, since some rivals dropped ideas (18:01, 18:30).

• The CMA stopped TopCashback acquiring a large UK competitor, which cost time and money; it later bought a cashback site in Sweden without any regulatory trouble (19:00, 19:32).

• Tomkins says he would start with ethics from day one. He describes a fair play policy, recalls the early affiliate days of pop-ups dropping cookies, and mentions a wind farm joint venture (21:00, 23:00, 24:30).

Interview from Lessons from Losing by Awin, published on YouTube.