Today MyPoints released the results of a member survey about their intended holiday shopping this year. They polled around 1,000 of their members, “the internet’s most active and frequent shoppers,” and found that more than half of them intended to do about half their holiday shopping online this year. Big shocker.
I don’t know, I found the full survey results pretty boring. But I don’t think the intention of the press release was to really provide any useful information, it was to say, “Hey! MyPoints is still here! PLEASE shop through us!”
They say MyPoints’ biggest shoppers plan to continue to shop through the program, and they quote one member who said she liked being able to shop for her grandkids and earn GCs with her points. Yeah, like there aren’t other programs that do that, too…and pay more. And faster. And who aren’t up for sale.
The press release went on to tout the generosity of its members in making point donations for Katrina, saying that it amounted to more than $600,000 to date. We’ll kind of have to take their word for it, since MyPoints refused to give out the exact dollar value that each member’s point donations were buying.
They brag that GCs are sent just days after redemption (a fact I don’t dispute at all — except for Webcertificates), but they don’t mention how long it takes for those points to become available for redemption — for many offers and shopping transactions, it’s 30 days.
And that’s what bothers me.
What wasn’t said, and what I have to caution you with again, is that MyPoints’ parent company has announced its intention to sell MyPoints. MyPoints may be up and running when you do your shopping, but will it be there in 30 days when your pending points become available? Or in however many days after that, when you finally get enough points to cash out? MyPoints is not giving you the entire story.
MyPoints may be sold to another company and the program may continue without any interruption or changes to point value whatsoever. WE JUST DON’T KNOW. To be plugging your program, making press releases a month before the Christmas shopping season starts, encouraging people to shop through your program without giving them the whole story, is in my opinion irresponsible and unethical.
Here‘s the press release if you want to read it.
