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Get paid to walk with Bounts - via a fitness tracker or your phone

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  • Feral_Moon
    Feral_Moon Posts: 2,943 Forumite
    indesisiv wrote: »
    Erm ...

    If you’re new to Bounts, sign up by email (not Facebook) and enter the referral code MSE2016 to get 100 extra points AFTER your first activity. Everyone gets an additional 90 points in total for signing up, connecting your first app or device, and tracking your first activity.

    Does that answer why they are still advertising it?

    My comment was referring to the fact Bounts is going into meltdown and can't cope with the number of members that have joined since MSE started promoting them.

    They're quick to take you're membership fee but then it's almost impossible to cash in your points for any vouchers. Following thousands of complaints, the founder of the company was also incredibly rude to members in a recent FB post he made accusing everyone of being money grabbing and only in it for the vouchers, yet this is the main focus of their advertisement, inviting people to earn as much as £200 a year!
  • There does seem to be stock issues with bounts which have gotten worse over the last couple of months. I signed up 27 jan this year and decided to go premium plus, which as an offer I paid £12.99 for it. I have had £40 in vouchers since jan and have just ordered another £5 morrisons voucher this morning. I would have managed to earn more vouchers but I had fractured my foot and been in a low speed car crash since I joined up. I am a bit accident prone. For me, I have managed to gain some spending money for christmas through the vouchers by exercising. It's £30 I didn't have before I got the app.
  • indesisiv
    indesisiv Posts: 6,359 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker Debt-free and Proud!
    Feral_Moon wrote: »
    My comment was referring to the fact Bounts is going into meltdown and can't cope with the number of members that have joined since MSE started promoting them.

    Exactly, but MSE are advertising people to sign up with their referral code, so I presume that MSE are getting some sort of kickbacks for the referrals.
    “Time is intended to be spent, not saved” - Alfred Wainwright
  • Bounts was set up - according to their founder - to encourage fitness. To do this they offer vouchers to incentivise members (and this is heavily promoted as the core reason). However, once you have amassed your points you seem to have more chance of winning the lottery than being online at precisely the right time of the day to grab the handful of vouchers available. Then the founder posts a snotty email essentially calling us money grabbers for wanting to claim our hard-earned vouchers and telling us that we aren't contributing to the 'culture of the community'!

    So I have a simple question: if you take the voucher incentive away from Bounts as reason for using it, what is the purpose of it?
  • jsp_1983
    jsp_1983 Posts: 34 Forumite
    I signed up for Bounts a while back; since then, the email address I used exclusively for my Bounts account started receiving spam.
  • mrusty5
    mrusty5 Posts: 31 Forumite
    I joined Bounts in February, mainly because I was walking a little and thought it would give me encouragement to do more. I soon realised that I needed to pay for the premium + for it to be enough encouragement. Since then I have upped my walking to more than double what it was before, now walking 20+ miles a week and generally hitting more than 10000 steps on 5 out of 7 days. To start with, it was getting the vouchers that mattered, but now hitting the 10000 steps matters more to me. Having said that, I have managed to claim back £60 of vouchers, the last of those yesterday. So although it is a shame that perhaps Bounts is not quite delivering as it did earlier on in the year, I personally cannot complain, as I am happy with the benefits I have gained, both in vouchers, and in fitness. I will stick with them for the year, but whether I will renew next year, remains to be seen.
    :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):)

  • Lavendyr
    Lavendyr Posts: 2,610 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    I joined Bounts in July and paid the monthly £1.49 for a few months. In that time I managed, very luckily, to get £10 worth of vouchers, so I did all right out of it. But I was infuriated by the founder's Facebook message and their subsequent decision to ban users from their Facebook page who either responded negatively or, like me, asked genuine questions which they clearly don't want to answer. I don't want to deal with a company like that so I cancelled my membership straight after.
  • ellay864
    ellay864 Posts: 3,827 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    I joined in May, taking out premium membership on annual payment. I've only managed to claim one £5 voucher since then. Last week I cancelled and my refund is in progress
  • jogu
    jogu Posts: 54 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10 Posts Combo Breaker
    I cancelled my membership. It took them almost 4 weeks to actually get around to processing the refund, and it's not yet appeared on my card (though I presume it will in the next few days).

    I've visited the shop a few times in the past weeks and found vouchers in stock, but the shop was running so slow it was impossible to buy them before they ran out of stock again. The shop also seems to be quite buggy, quite often you'll get booted out of the during the process of trying to buy.

    You can see a bit about the history of the company here:

    https://pitchbook.com/profiles/bounts-profile-investors-funding-valuation-and-analysis

    (Some info is obscured; I've not found a free source for the info.)

    Assuming that is right, it does unfortunately seem like bounts has hit a bit of a crisis. Several members report that bounts is spending a lot of time removing any negative posts from their Facebook page.

    They continue to advertise that the reason for paying for premium+ is so you can get over £200 back in vouchers, which seems very at odds with the statement from their CEO that it shouldn't be viewed as a 'Nectar type store experience'.

    I saw a post somewhere that said they'd only had 100 refund requests, so simple paths seems to suggest they can process less than 5 refunds a day given the 4 weeks mine took.

    Perhaps the most frustrating thing is they don't seem to be actually achieving the kind of tie ups you would expect them to achieve - with their highly active user base, wouldn't you expect to see lots of evan cycles, nike, sweat shop and so on vouchers in their shop? ie. the kind of shops that would really want to tempt the user base in for a first look.

    Particularly oddly, even for the cases like Amazon, they don't appear to be collecting any referral fees (via Amazon Associates) when the amazon voucher is used, which would seem to be a lost revenue stream.

    It's all very disappointing; the concept they are going after seems like it could work, but the execution (at least once it got popular) seems to be lacking. I can't really see any good place they go from here; with it allegedly being about 18 months since they got their VC funding I would imagine cash is now getting pretty tight, and the delays in providing refunds and the extremely constricted supply of vouchers would seem to confirm that cashflow is an issue.

    I hope I'm wrong, I'll be watching and will definitely reconsider resubscribing if they manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
  • SG27
    SG27 Posts: 2,773 Forumite
    I think your right. Look at running heros you can exchange points for various money off vouchers for sport shops and event entries. Also some great challenges which offer I prize draw to win sporting equipment. Ice won a pair of socks and got a free bix of protien bars with my points. Now got enough points for 50% off a new pair of trainers.

    Its not as rewarding as bounts was when it constant voucher stocks but it so much better than it is now.
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