First of all it is necessary to realize that if you get a cellular telephone contract, it is not with one company, you are in effect dealing with two (except if you go straight to the network provider). Usually you will purchase your cellular phone from a retailer, be they a high street shop or on the internet. Then you will be obliged to pay a monthly bill to your network provider. The relationship between the retailer and the network provider is commission based. That means the mobile network provider pays commission to the store.

The mobile phone store cannot  change the monthly cost charged by the network, this is fixed. To help promote contracts the shop may spend some of their commission on incentivized deals. Ten years ago it was sufficient for them to just give away a free handset. This after all was a time when cellular telephones were very expensive and were often seen as a kind of status symbol.

These days though, things are different. Cellular Phones are far more common and are a lot cheaper, so, stores are forced to ply their customers with ever more attractive incentives, such as free laptops or even free televisions.

{Naturally} many consumers are not interested in free gifts, they want the lowest priced mobile deal available, and this is where automatic cash back comes into play. As the shop is unable to reduce the monthly rental of a mobile rental, they instead offer to give some money to the customer there and then. So, for example, if the consumer tries to obtain a Twenty Percent discount in montyly line rental, the cellphone retailer will simply calculate the value of that discount and refund the cash immediately.

Automatic cash back deals are not to be confused with free line rental or cash back by redemption deals, in which customers have to claim cash back later on in the contract. Because of dubious terms and conditions attached to these claims for cash back many customers never received their refund, and so lost faith in the cash-back by redemption deals.

So, the automatic cash back offer was conceived. These deals promised more realistic savings than the cash-back by redemption deals, but, the refund was guaranteed. It was automatic, paid to the consumer the moment the offer was completed, and so, the term automatic cash-back was conceived for this kind of mobile phone contract.

For consumers wanting an automatic cash-back mobile promotion, without question, the easiest place to find one is online. Whilst it is possible to find one of these offers on the high street it is unlikely. For one thing, the high street phone shops do not generally offer such good deals or promotions purely because their overheads are a lot more than those of the online competition (though their consumer service is usually better). Also, it is problematic for stores to make money with these deals. The profit margins with automatic cash-back deals are so tight that they require constant attention, factoring in changes in the levels of commission paid and the price of of handsets. This means that the shelf life of a specific offer is quite short, once that ends you (as a consumer) have to wait for the next automatic cash-back offer to come along.

For this reason mobile phone comparison sites are usually the best way to find an automatic cashback promotion, as they will show all offers by all online retailers on one page. These deals are obscure, representing a tiny amount of the total number of offers on offer, and, you will have to accept an older less well featured handset in order to obtain one. But for the thrifty, automatic cash-back deals are by far the cheapest way to run a mobile phone.Related Content:

• Governments Push Mobile Phone Recycling
• Mobile Phones – Where To Find The Best Deals
• How To Sell Broken Mobile phones for Cash?