Has anyone heard of/used the shopping club?

ikr2

I was looking at this and was put off by:

- the hassle of loading up a card 5 days in advance. That would tie my funds to a particular supermarket for that week. I have a choice of 4 within 2 miles of my home and go where the offers/discount vouchers are

- The charges: £1.99 P&P per order (up to 5 pre pay cards); £1.99 per debit card top up(?); 2% per credit card top up; £1 per cash back withdrawal to a bank (OK so it's free if you move it to a pre pay card)

pruney

I looked into it but charging you everytime you top up your payment, you have to have different payment cards for different shops and some of them are vouchers not cards. Then there are costs to post out the vouchers as well. It seems everytime you load, whichever way you do it, you have to pay. Plus you have to pay to withdraw the cashback and if you don't withdraw it by your anniversary date you lose it. If you just had 1 payment card that covered all the merchants and they didn't charge you to load it, then it'd be a lot more appealing. Plus the potential 5 day wait for the funds to appear, for someone like me who gets paid weekly, just isn't quick enough. I'm going to keep my eye on them and when/if they improve their extra "fees", I'll consider again.

pruney

coupleuk wrote: »

"too much hassle to be worth it" :eek:

No wonder this Country is in the state it's in - everyone wants everything for nothing and with no effort.

1) Join for £10
2) Order shopping card and pay to credit it by debit card
3) Card arrives
4) Use it in ASDA to pay at checkout just as you would cash or card
5) Every now and again claim the cashback

If THAT is too much hassle then please let me know all the schemes which can save me £200+ a year with less hassle.

I'm not saying this is the Holy Grail of shopping but it can prove worthwhile.

I only focussed on one shop, but there are plenty of others and many have less "hassle" to participate.

I think Asda is one of the shops you have to buy the vouchers for, they don't use the payment card. It's good to get the discount on fuel that they offer but for me, only sainsburys would be viable as Morrisons and Asda both want you to buy the vouchers for it

The_Shopping_Club

Hardup_Hester wrote: »

I looked into it when a family member was conned into joining, it cost them a fortune & was a waste of time & money

Hi All

Found these posts concerning the shopping club and wanted to address some on the misconceptions being posted about the service.

Firstly regarding the above the shopping club is a new service and was launched in May this year. There are a number of other organisation out there with similar names but please do not confuse them with this new service.

Secondly, we must post an apology for the typo on the Debit Card charge, this should have been 50p and not £1.99. This referred to replacement cards if they were lost, sorry. You can load as many of your gift cards in one transaction and spread the 50p charge across multiple loads. Also if a card is lost we are able to cancel the card and transfer the balance to a replacement card.

The cards we send out are reloadable so you only pay the P&P charge once. Thereafter the only charges for loading cards are the Debit/Credit card processing fees.

Thirdly regarding the use of cards and vouchers in petrol stations unfortunately pay at the pump systems do not accept vouchers or gift cards so therefore the station needs to be manned.

Finally the time taken to load the cards is up to 5 working days but we do our best to load the next day where possible. We are constrained by the process of the loads by our retail partners.

Sorry about any misunderstanding and do feel free to respond to this thread if you have any questions.

Mike @ the shopping club.

icehockeyjoe

Not really prepared to pay the full £30 cost for this but if it appears as a Groupon deal in Sheffield at £10 I'd be happy to give this a go

geordie_joe

The_Shopping_Club wrote: »

Firstly regarding the above the shopping club is a new service and was launched in May this year. There are a number of other organisation out there with similar names but please do not confuse them with this new service.

Most of the others, with similar names have very bad reputations......... So why did you name yours with a similar name?

Why didn't you give it a completely different name, so you wouldn't have to trawl the net posting in forums to explain you are not those other companies with the bad reputations?

Last, why didn't you read the rules before posting in here?

coupleuk

I signed up for this thru Groupon at £10 instead of £29.95 - the problem was that the voucher code couldnt be used for 4 days after I made the purchase, so that was a bit of a pain.

I have managed to register today.

The "local deals" section is VERY poor - only 2 deals within 10 miles of me and not much within 20 miles. I feel all of the deals shown could be got just by asking or doing a quick web search.

The same goes for the "print vouchers" area of the website - all offers are available elsewhere and many are just std deals the retailers offer (most are on their own websites). This "offer" just isnt worth The Shopping Club promoting and I think actually tarnishes the scheme.

Reloadable Cards - again, many of the deals are available via places like Quidco. You obviously dont need to top-up etc etc when going down that route.

Of course, with Quidco you will only benefit with online purchases whereas the cards can be used in-store. But, does anyone actually go into places like Comet, Argos etc and buy stuff these days; I know I don't and much prefer to do it all online.

So, what does that leave me with?

I've signed up for the ASDA shopping card. As I detailed in my earlier posts it will give me a £200/year saving.

That's the only positive thing I can say about joining the "Club". It will be great to save £200/year and really isnt a great deal of hassle IF you have the finances to load £500 at a time using a Debit Card (less than that and the savings start to reduce due to the card fees).

Paul

coupleuk

My ASDA Gift Card arrived today from theshoppingclub and was easy to activate online.

I topped-up with £500; which cost me £500.50 (50p debit card fee).

My account immediately shows £20 cashback, which Ive transfered to my Gift Card.

So, it has cost me £2.49 (£1.99 postage and 50p to topup card) and Ive got an extra £20 to spend at ASDA - a profit of £17.50.

Not bad for little effort.

I think I will probably topup 10 times over the year so will earn £193.00 and need to deduct the £10 Groupon cost of joining the scheme.

So, a £183 annual saving for shopping where we'd be shopping anyway.

Of course, you've got to have the cash sat in your bank to preload the card so it's not much use if you are living week by week.

Paul

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hill1082

I too have signed up to this offer via groupon.

£10 for offer through groupon. ordered six reloadable cards which cost £1.99 for delivery plus 50p for debit card processing fee.

This morning I loaded £450 onto comet card and £50 onto B&Q card, with one charge of 50p which covered the transaction to load both cards.

I now have cashback in my account of £39 which more than covers my initial outlay of £12.99.

Still waiting for the cash to be loaded onto my cards.

There are a lot of negative comments about the effort involved. I would have thought people on this site very price savvy and follow the tips to save some cash.

I will post again when i have the cash and bought a nice bit of tech from comet (which i was going to buy anyway).

Brian.

midnight_bazaar

I've signed up to this but must admit the savings discounts displayed are gross savings,

there seem to be lots of hidden charges -i.e the ones they fail to mention on the front page.

1 )as mentioned first you pay £1.99 to order the reloadable gift cards -which are free to pick up in store anyway -and you may think you can reload the gift cards for no extra fees in store (to avoid theshoppingclub add-on-fees) you can BUT you won't earn cashback for that.

2) then you pay a fee to load your own money onto the card, either 2% or 50p for debit cards each time

3) If you chose to have a voucher -then you pay a fee to buy that this time you are charged 99p postage for them to post the voucher out this 99p postage charge is added to the total and on top of that you are either charged flat fee of 50p if you pay by debit card or 2% credit card fees

4) then after all the processing times and fees if you are lucky enough to get any cashback after the £29 / or discounted £10 annual fee it is not free to get this cashback transferred to your bank account. It will cost £2 each time to get your cashback transferred to your bank account. Other sites transfer to bank accounts for no extra fees.

Of course, you can get your cashback loaded back on one of the reloaded cards you already paid 1.99 for but there's nothing like real cash is there?!

The savings advertised are grossly inflated and one should bear that in mind when they use the service, to find out the actual net savings after all the hidden charges they have failed to clearly advertise at the start, plus the hassle of ordering reloadable cards or having vouchers posted and paying fees to buy, use your own card to pay, etc and over the odds postage.