Facebook has striked yet another deal and this time it is partnering a card issuer and as expected the associate partner is no small one. Its the well-known American Express who has planned an expansion with the social networking giant. This partnership will offer coupons which would be personalized. The basis of these coupons would be the interests, liking of a cardholder along with a few more information which would be of personal nature. This news marked an entrant significantly in the market which relates to deals on a daily basis.
If one has any details about sites which are into daily deal, they would know that the largest sites in this section are LivingSocial and Groupon. However Amex has a specific advantage through its application that it gives the card holders an option to just add their favorite deals to their Amex accounts. This can be done in a simple way by just clicking on the deals to add them. This is even a good one as there is no requirement for spending money to get a hand on their preferred deals.
To make the theory simple, here is an example. If an Amex cardholder is purchasing goods of 20 USD at Whole Foods, and they have a deal clicked on to get back 5 USD on a purchase of 20 USD at the said place, then this deal would get activated automatically when they visit the said mart next time and this 5 USD tallies in their Amex statement on the credit side. The card issuer claims that the credit takes place a max of 5 days once the purchase is made. However it can even take two rounds of billing cycles to see the credit in one’s account. Again if the deal is not used at all, there is no penalty which the cardholders attracts.
Yipit.com which keeps a track of this specific industry, states that the biggies in the industry, LivingSocial and Groupon have their customers to pay for the said deal coupons up front. Again the disadvantage is that the refund cannot be claimed once the expiry date is gone or if one does not wish to redeem the specific coupon. Here the percentage of coupons which are not redeemed is a high up to 20%.
Talking about the Amex offer, it is still an uncertain case as to how would the company use Facebook support to lure their cardholders to avail such coupons. As for the start, this application has been planned to launch offers which would be for national retailers and for the count it is for 100 such retailers. However there are plans that in the coming future even the local retailers could be on the list.
There are even perquisites available for merchants via this application of Amex. The benefit is that as all such deals come up to be redeemable only via Amex cards, which means that tracking would be effective yet easy for the merchants. The card issuer’s vice president of global marketing, Luke Gebb said that the merchants can actually see which is an effective deal for them and which isn’t.
Amex is again superior as they would not charge the merchants a cut on the amount of sales which is done via Amex. This is again a problem which merchants usually face when they link in with LivingSocial and Groupon. Amex application would resolve this problem for the time being but as this coupon service gains popularity, Amex would start charging to the merchants.
But for the customers its a win-win situation as there is no hassle of safeguarding actual coupons. And it has no real disadvantage which comes out of availing such coupons.