ZIPZERO – Snap those receipts​ and get the cost of those bills down!

For many of us, paying bills is one of our least favourite things to do. It’s hardly surprising with the cost of electricity, gas, council tax, internet and TV subscriptions seemingly rising at a rate that far exceeds pay rises. 

When you’re trying to cut down costs, monthly bills are usually the first thing to be changed. Comparison websites allow us to hop between providers as we search for this month’s cheapest deal on utilities. That’s all well and good. Everyone loves getting the best price possible. However, we’re sometimes in a position where we must make sacrifices that we don’t really want to make. Cancelling the sports or movie channels on your TV service isn’t fun if that’s what you enjoy.

But what if there was a way to reduce how much you’re spending on bills each month without having to make sacrifices or put in lots of extra hours at work? 

ZIPZERO could very well provide the solution to this problem.

What is ZIPZERO?

ZIPZERO is a mobile app that provides you with cash to spend on your monthly bills in exchange for photographs of your shopping receipts. 

The ZIPZERO app works differently to alternative cashback services because your balance is built from everyday shopping within all UK-based retailers. Rather than withdrawing your funds, they are sent directly to your billing provider. For example, you could choose to use your balance to help pay for your electricity, gas, telephone, internet, TV, or council tax bills. 

Normally on here, we review ways of Making Money with smartphone apps such as Roamler or BeMyEye but with ZIPZERO’S ability to save you money on your bills this app is well worth a look!

How Does ZIPZERO Work?

All you need to do to get started with ZIPZERO is to download the mobile app and then sign up for an account using a valid email address. 

The great thing about ZIPZERO is that it’s completely free to use so there’s really no downside to giving it a go.

Once you’ve signed up, you’re ready to go. Whenever you buy something from a UK-based retailer, make sure you get a receipt. Once you’ve done that, open the ZIPZERO app and use your phone camera to take a photograph of the receipt.

When your receipt has been approved, you’ll be rewarded with at least 1% of the value of your purchases and can then add your biller’s account details and make a payment to them at any time you want.

Simple.

How Much Can I Earn?

The only small print you really need to concern yourself with is that fact that there is a maximum of £50 per month earnings on your account and users have to use the funds within 3 months of them becoming available.

The reason they set this limit to encourage users to use ZIPZERO funds to pay (at least partially) their bills regularly, preferably every month. It’s what, in terms of attitude makes them different from usual cashback websites.

Nevertheless, you’d need to scan up to £5,000 worth of receipts in order to hit this cap. 

It’s important to note here, however, that there are no limits to the number of receipts you can scan. Whether you’ve done a big weekly shop or bought a packet of chewing gum from the corner shop, you can scan your receipt and will receive the rewards.

Is ZIPZERO Too Good to Be True? 

At first glance, I thought that ZIPZERO might promise a lot but underdeliver. Receiving cashback on any kind of shopping in the UK seemed too good to be true. My main concern was working out where the money to pay app users comes from.

However, after looking into all the details, ZIPZERO’s method is clever. 

ZIPZERO and their retail partners have created a circle of user consumption. ZIPZERO provides retailers with an opportunity to offer products and services directly to app users in exchange for a system that rewards users with cash to directly pay such bills. And round and round it goes. 

Another great thing about ZIPZERO is that they protect your personal data. The only thing you need to provide in order to sign up for an account is a valid email address. ZIPZERO promises not to sell any user data and only collects purchasing habit information in order to offer personalised product deals to each user.

What Are the Rules of ZIPZERO?

With all this great stuff in mind, there are a few rules that you need to be aware of in order to earn as much as possible and keep your ZIPZERO account in healthy standing.

Firstly, you should make sure that you are only scanning receipts that relate to purchases made in a UK shop. All purchases must be made by yourself or another member of your household and must be for personal expenses. Business or commercial expenses are not covered in the ZIPZERO reward system.

The ZIPZERO receipt recognition technology can detect if receipts are scanned on more than one occasion. You must not try to trick the system by scanning receipts more than once and any accounts found to be in repeat violation of this rule may be closed at any time.

Receipts must be scanned within 7 days of purchase date. Any receipts scanned after this point will not be credited with a reward. 

ZIPZERO analyses purchase history in order to provide users with personalised product and service offers that may be of interest. For this reason, you are not allowed to scan receipts for people outside of your household. Violation of these terms may lead to account closure. 

Following receipt upload, ZIPZERO takes up to 48hrs to verify your entry. Funds will initially appear in your account as ‘Pending’ and will change to ‘Available’ once confirmed. ‘Available’ funds can be used to make bill payments at any time if your balance contains a minimum of £1.

ZIPZERO funds appear as Units. The conversion rate is 1 Unit to £1.

To pay a bill, you must add the payment details of your chosen biller, including your customer reference number. Incorrect details may lead to delayed or blocked rewards. Any attempt to add payment details that do not relate to an approved biller may lead to account closure.

Every member of your household may own an account. This will allow you to collectively earn up to £50 worth of bill payments per month on each account. All members must be UK residents over the age of 18 with a valid email address. 

Other Smartphone Apps you can use to save you money

ZIPZERO isn’t the only smartphone app out there which you can use to help save you money.

• There are money management offerings from the likes of Chip, Revolut and Emma.
• Money-saving apps like Alertr to keep up with the latest deals and ByMiles with its unique offering around the price of car insurance.
• Finally, there are money-making smartphone apps like BeMyEye and Roamler which like most of these money making apps can make you some major money!

ZIPZERO and Coronavirus

Like a lot of other fintech companies ZIPZERO have had to make some recent changes to their payouts to keep their business float

The changes are :

Beginning 22nd April 2020

• No new Registrations
• Lowering the reward for each scanned receipt from 1% to 0.5%. 
• Extending the verification period from two days to seven
• Available Units held in your account, will be valid for 12 months, instead of 3 months, from the date the Units are confirmed as being Available.
   

The Bottom Line

ZIPZERO isn’t the kind of app that will provide you with enough income to stop working. That’s just wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, it does provide users with an opportunity to pay a decent amount of their monthly bills without much effort. 

The fact that you can sign up for a ZIPZERO account for free makes it a no-brainer. Of course, you’ll have to spend a little bit of time taking photographs of your receipts but there’s no requirement to spend more money in the shops than you usually do.

The fact that several members of the same household can open individual accounts greatly increases the potential cashback earnings and may be the difference between feeling like you can put the heating on or not.

For me, ZIPZERO provides an easy way to take some of the guilt away from paying for extra sport channels. My spending habits don’t have to change in order to earn and that’s what makes this app a winner in my eyes. 

Try ZIPZERO today and see how you get on. It’s free to sign up. Just remember to ask for a receipt the next time you’re buying something from a UK-based shop.
ZIPZERO Funding Update

ZIPZERO Funding update

Update 4th November 2021

Dear ZIPZERO Users,Hope you are all doing well as we rapidly head into the festive season.Since our last update, we have been busy working to deliver the changes we promised in September. The time has come to announce that we are nearly ready to launch the new and improved ZIPZERO. Our tech team is putting the final touches to the new version of the app.Our principal goal is to allow users to earn even higher rewards on online shopping with our partners – whilst maintaining the ability to collect and redeem a base reward for scanning traditional receipts from any shop.A BRIEF RUNDOWNOur mission from the start has been to help consumers monetise the enormous value in your shopping data. Every day, global giants like Google and Facebook track what we do online and earn cash by allowing retailers to target us with ads. Meanwhile, we rarely see a single penny of this wealth. As consumers, we believe everyone should have the right to benefit from the value of their shopping data. This is why we created a smart tool — the new ZIPZERO app — to enable everyone to gain access to a fair portion of these funds. Furthermore, we wanted to keep putting this cash directly towards an essential cause: monthly bill payment.HOW DOES THE NEW ZIPZERO WORK?As we outlined in our September update; we took the leap of reworking the app to make it possible to start swiftly generating revenues without watering down our principles. Based on a fair circle of exchange, the app will now allow users to shop online and earn even bigger rewards thanks to our retail partnerships.At the same time, we have decided to allow users to continue scanning their receipts for a base reward (0.5%). This is also because the data contained in every receipt lets us tailor special offers from partner merchants to your shopping preferences – along with a premium reward (c.1-10%). Every time you shop with one of our retail partners and earn premium reward units, ZIPZERO earns a commission from processing the sale. We use this commission not only to pay out your premium rewards but also to cover the base rewards you earn from sharing your shopping receipts (both physical and digital) within the app. This is how we are able to close the loop on a fair consumer exchange — by allowing consumers to benefit from the value of their own shopping data.This is how we are able to close the loop on a fair consumer exchange – by allowing consumers to benefit from the value of their own shopping data.WHEN DOES THE NEW ZIPZERO GO LIVE?The launch of the new ZIPZERO app is planned for the 22nd of November – just before the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season – yes, Black Friday! To use the app’s new premium rewards feature, simply initiate any shopping trip through the app to earn maximum rewards on your purchase. Browse through our broad range of retail partners to find exactly what you are looking for and earn even more cash to pay your monthly bills.We have also launched a brand new landing page for the new app. The new website provides all the details and FAQs to explain exactly how the new app works. There you can also find information on how to redeem reward units earned in the previous version of the app.READY TO LAUNCH!We cannot stress enough how important it is that so many of our users have stuck with us and continued to support our start-up journey. It has not been easy but our experiences over the past two years have pushed us to come back stronger! We look forward to continuing to pave the way for consumers to access the enormous pools of advertising budgets that we all have a right to dip into. Find out more about the app launch by visiting our landing page at www.zipzero.com.Thank you again for bearing with us and we look forward to continuing this journey with you!Stay safe!Our very best,The ZIPZERO Team

Update 12th January 2021

Dear ZIPZERO Users,We hope you all are safe and doing well. 2020 is finally behind us. It is only natural that we keep the faith that the situation will soon improve – for ZIPZERO and for us all – in the new year. 2020 will be remembered as the year when we had to constantly consider and reconsider whether it made sense to keep fighting for ZIPZERO. At times, it seemed as if it would be easier to give up than to keep on pushing. What kept us going during these trying times were all the encouraging words from our users. This support helped us stand strong in our long-standing mission to help each and every consumer to monetise the value of their shopping data and to secure the benefits of sharing that data within the digital economy.We realise that for many of you out there, it may be hard to keep the faith. Of course, we have seen the comments from users that claim we may never deliver and they feel let down. We understand where this frustration comes from. We know we have kept our users in limbo since last spring – right when the pandemic hit and our business was left stranded like so many other young businesses in 2020. Despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to secure funding in 2020 and we weren’t able to cover your rewards over that period. At the same time, we want to make it clear that we have not profited in any way from the receipts scanned into the app. However, the fact that the majority of our users continued to scan their receipts (and mail in their online receipts) has meant that we are able to show traction and prove our value proposition to prospective investors. Our business is founded on a sense of propriety and we could not fathom going against the interests of our users. We will never profit from our users’ data without their knowledge and without extending a fair share of those profits with our community of users. We built ZIPZERO with the firm conviction that everyone should have access to the digital economy and be able to draw out a maximum benefit from their participation in it. Every day, big corporations benefit by funnelling millions of pounds to their businesses thanks to the data that consumers share online on a daily basis. We started ZIPZERO to give people like us a way to monetise their own data for their own benefit. We believe that corporations should revert a fair share of the digital economy back into the pockets of consumers themselves. This faith has bolstered our fight to survive 2020 intact and to see the light at the end of the tunnel in 2021. We are committed to seeing our mission come to fruition!So the most important question right now is this: what’s the status of ZIPZERO? Since our last update, we’ve had to shift our strategy quite significantly. Many investors that we spoke within the fall were interested in taking a slice of our technology and data – but we are determined to stick to our goal of finding an investor who is not only interested in our financial potential – but also our social mission of unlocking the benefits of the digital economy for our users. We have established contacts with some promising candidates and we are sticking to our timeline of securing the funds we need within the first quarter of 2021. Big thank you again to all of you sticking by us. We look forward to finally sharing some good news for our users and the future of the business. Yours,The ZIPZERO Founders

Update 5th August 2020

Dear ZIPZERO USERS, 

We hope this message finds you well. As we forecast on our social media last week, we’re writing to you today to explain our current situation in detail and to lay out our plans going forward. We understand this is a long read but we want to share with you the whole situation.

What’s happened

As we informed you last week, the investor who had pledged to finance our business through the Future Fund was forced to pull out of the agreement. Unfortunately, the investor met up with his own set of obstacles related to the current economic situation and on 27 July, we were informed that the investor would not be making the investment as agreed. Because government support was dependent on the investor transferring their share of the investment, that opportunity also fell through. Needless to say, this has placed ZIPZERO in a tough spot. We currently do not have a definitive source of financing and we have had to restart the process from scratch. 

What’s next 

These recent hurdles have hit our team really hard. We have put our very best efforts, our time, and our initial investment into getting ZIPZERO off the ground last year. Since the pandemic hit, we’ve been continuing to fight to stay afloat. Our employees and users have trusted us to make it through this tough time. The faith that you all have shown us over these past few months has given us the power to keep going. So thank you again for all the support you’ve shown us in your comments and messages. It means a great deal. 

Now, we still have a tough road ahead but the most important thing is that we have a plan and the drive to put that plan into action. We are committed to making ZIPZERO a success and helping our users across the country pay their monthly bills.

What we’ve set out to do over the coming weeks:

1. We are in the process of reviewing a list of investors who had previously invested in ZIPZERO or expressed interest in investing. We are actively getting back in touch to see if they are in a position to lend a hand as we launch this new fundraising round. More importantly, we are building a new list of strong strategic investors, some of whom have reached out to us themselves in recent weeks. Now, we realistically assess the process of bringing new investors on board to take up to three months. This is the timeframe needed in order to finalize a solid investment that will allow us to pay what we owe to our users and to achieve our long-term goals going forward. 

2. Over this three-month period, we will have to extend the verification period for new ZIPZERO funds to three months. In other words, funds earned from scanned receipts and processed online orders (for beta testers) will become available no earlier than three months from the date of scanning. As soon as we have secured the required amount of financing from our investors, we will return to the seven-day verification period for scanned receipts. 

3. Since we currently don’t have the funds to cover the transfers that have been ordered since the pandemic first struck in March, we will also have to cancel those orders and put the units back into our users’ ZIPZERO wallets for future payments. These units will appear as ‘available’ but we won’t be able to carry out your payment orders until we have finalised the upcoming investment process. As soon as that happens, users will be able to order the payment from their ZIPZERO wallets to cover a single or several utility bills at a time – with no limit on the amount that is ordered for payment. 

We hope that we have shed some light on our current situation and what our position is going forward. We realize for some of you, three more months is just too long to wait. We respect every decision our users decide to take in this matter. On our end, we want to give ourselves ample time to come through with a comprehensive investment strategy that takes into account everything that the changing economy has brought to the table. We also want to be transparent with our users every step of the way and we’ll continue to provide updates with every new development. Of course, we do hope that you will continue to stick with us over the next part of our journey. As soon as we have a new investment secured, we will make sure to come up with a meaningful way to show our thanks to all the users who have stuck with us. 

The pandemic has shaken up our world and brought on some harsh changes. It’s up to us to navigate this new reality. What remains unchanged is our dedication to our mission of helping people take control of their spending data and use that power to cover their monthly bills. Our belief in the strength of this mission is what will keep us battling forward towards a more optimistic future. 

As a brief note regarding the current state of our business, we can confirm that we are not currently selling or otherwise sharing our users’ shopping data. The value that ZIPZERO holds for its users and investors is its potential to draw retailers into the circle and allow them to reward our users directly for every purchase they make in the form of bill payment. Again, we will share any developments we make regarding investments and partnerships with our users as they happen. 

Update 29th July 2020

Dear users,

It’s with heavy hearts that we write today to inform you all that the investment that we had been counting on did not pan out in the end. To put it simply, the investor was not able to deposit the funds and had to pull out of the agreement. We had been preparing for this eventuality and we are currently working to put our back-up plan into action. We will provide our users with a more detailed update next week.

We apologize for the ongoing delay and we are continuing to do all we can to make sure we can make payments and secure the future of the business as soon as possible. We’ve put so much into the business that we can’t imagine giving up now – no matter the hardships we’re facing. Again, we will provide more answers in next week’s email.

Stay safe,

The ZIPZERO Team

Update 8th July 2020

ZIPZERO have been waiting to get additional funding for a while now. Their latest update on their Facebook page which was last updated on July 8th 2020 says

Dear ZIPZERO Users,
Over two weeks ago, we shared some great news. We had managed to find an investor that would not only help us catch up with all our outstanding payments, but also help us trudge forward securely towards the future. We’d been confident that the investment process would be complete by now. The reality of the legal & financial hurdles involved in securing a sum of this size means that the delivery of the investment has been delayed. The fact that we are dealing with an international investor is the main reason it is taking so long -there are many hoops of approval they need to jump through to have the investment finalised. The chaos that Covid has brought to the table has not made it any easier or quicker. 

We feel terribly sorry that we are forced to deliver such a dismal update once again. The situation is all the more harrowing as our employees & contractors haven’t been paid in full over this time. We have been counting on this injection of funds to cover our obligations to the key individuals who have kept ZIPZERO going in spite of the hardships.

We know you are tired of waiting. What we can vouch for is that the legal part of the transaction is to be complete by the end of next week. This is essential for the full transfer to arrive, which can take up to 8 working days. Rest assured that as soon as the funds appear in our account, we will execute all outstanding bill payments immediately. We’re committed to covering what we owe to our users. 

We’re monitoring the situation daily & doing our utmost to speed the process along. It would have been the most basic solution back in March to suspend operations but we truly believe in our mission. We have devoted so much time & spirit to helping our users pay their bills & we can only ask our users to hang in there just a little bit longer. 

We share your frustration & we are looking forward to sharing some positive news very soon.

We feel terribly sorry that we are forced to deliver such a dismal update once again. The situation is all the more harrowing as our employees & contractors haven’t been paid in full over this time. We have been counting on this injection of funds to cover our obligations to the key individuals who have kept ZIPZERO going in spite of the hardships.

We know you are tired of waiting. What we can vouch for is that the legal part of the transaction is to be complete by the end of next week. This is essential for the full transfer to arrive, which can take up to 8 working days. Rest assured that as soon as the funds appear in our account, we will execute all outstanding bill payments immediately. We’re committed to covering what we owe to our users. 

We’re monitoring the situation daily & doing our utmost to speed the process along. It would have been the most basic solution back in March to suspend operations but we truly believe in our mission. We have devoted so much time & spirit to helping our users pay their bills & we can only ask our users to hang in there just a little bit longer. 

We share your frustration & we are looking forward to sharing some positive news very soon. 

Thank you again for all your support. 
Stay safe
The ZIPZERO Team

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