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Your grocery shop is probably something that you want to cut down on in the coming months. Find out whether Green Jinn is the app to help you do it.
This is my GreenJinn review after a few weeks of using the supermarket cashback app.
What is the GreenJinn app?
GreenJinn is a cashback app that gives you money back on your supermarket shop.
It’s like Topcashback or Quidco for groceries.
Why do you need to use GreenJinn?
Groceries are those things that we are regularly spending our money on without fail on a weekly or monthly basis.
In fact, the average household spends £61.90 on food and non-alcoholic drinks per week.
That’s an incredible £3,218 a year and that doesn’t even factor in the enormous amounts of food that we buy for Christmas.
So it makes sense that we use apps like GreenJinn to enable us to get cashback where we can.
My wife and I have already managed to cut our supermarket bill in half, though that doesn’t mean that we aren’t always looking for other ways to slash our bill, and using GreenJinn could be one of those things that help achieve this.
How easy is Green Jinn to use?
Luckily for me, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to use the app and it is simple enough.
- You choose the store
- Select their available offers, which in turn puts them in your shopping basket
- Buy the product and take a picture of your receipt
Payment should be made within 3 working days, so long as your receipt is not rejected. You must make sure that your picture has the store name, items, price, totals and date.
If like me you shop online this information might not be available on one sheet so you will have to take more than one picture to make sure that all the information is provided.
Where can you use the app to benefit from the savings?
When the app first can out you were limited in where you could use the app.
They had only three supermarkets listed, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.
They now have Morrisons, Ocado and Asda available as well as other non-supermarket merchants, such as Holland & Barratt and Superdrug to name only a couple.
Is GreenJinn free to use?
Yes.
As a user, all you have to do is download the app from the App or Play Store pick your offers and wait to get paid.
How do GreenJinn make its money?
Like any cashback website they make their money from the brands that they work with.
Think of them as a middle man promoting their client’s products and getting paid a commission for this referral.
With the money they make they give a little of this back to you in the form of cashback.
How much can you save using Green Jinn?
This is highly dependent on what offers you take advantage of.
There are some offers on products that I wouldn’t consider as they don’t fit into our family’s dietary needs but Green Jinn suggest that you could save up to £1500 per year, based on a weekly offer average of £30.
How do you get paid?
Once you have scanned your receipt and it has been confirmed, you can opt to be paid either by Paypal or directly into your account.
What about its competitors?
Each of these offers something different in the savings that they offer.
Competition can only be good for us the consumer and it is, for this reason, you should consider downloading the other supermarket cashback apps available such as Shopmium, and Checkout Smart.
Is there anything that I should consider about using these apps?
Remember that no money is guaranteed in whatever cash back app that you use and you should only take advantage of an offer if it was something that you were going to buy anyway.
The pros of using GreenJinn
- It’s free
- The app user interface is clean and easy to navigate
- Has products that you might actually want to buy often
- Available on IOS and Android
- Has a healthy living bias
- New offers every week
- Personalisation of coupons that you might want to receive
- Includes online shopping
- Get cashback when you have collected £1.50
- Able to get paid via your account or PayPal – I checked with Green Jinn and they informed me that all data that flows from their app is encrypted via SSL and bank account data is not stored as plain text but instead stored as mapped data using PHP’s Mcrypt AES 256 with conversions keys stored on a separate server
Cons
- Your receipt can be rejected (though this is more to do with it not meeting GreenJinn’s acceptance criteria)
- Currently unable to change your own email address on the app
- You have to contact GreenJinn directly if you want them to delete your account
So is it a worthwhile download?
I think that you’ve gathered from reading this post that I believe it is a worthy download.
Not all offers are going to suit everyone, but you might come across one or two that are just too good to miss.
Why, if you’ve read my Shopmium review you’ll know my frustration with these apps is that they sometimes only have items on offer that I might only try once and not bother about again.
GreenJinn has everyday items that I’m likely to buy and they now have a wider range of supermarkets than they did when I first downloaded the app.
I don’t see as more people get to know about it the people that run the app won’t be able to get more on board.
The co-founders of GreenJinn obviously have big plans for the platform as they have recently sought to raise some funding to enable them to roll out an online shopping function that would allow users to buy items directly from within the app.
