Survey Worth 100 Points Up at Greenpoints.com

Greenpoints.com is the online version of the old S&H Greenstamps program. I have a review of the program up here. If you're a member, please check out the survey available there for 100 points which updates your contact and demographic info and also asks a lot of questions about your online shopping habits for a planned upgrade of their shopping portal. This survey is available either as a popup when you first go to the site, or when logged in, go to Earn Greenpoints and you'll see it there.

This overhaul of their shopping portal is LONG overdue, in my opinion. First of all, Greenpoints offers one straight shopping rate for all their merchants: 10 points per dollar. When you do the math, that comes out to a rebate of about 1.2%. When you compare what other rewards programs are paying for the same purchase, generally 1.2% is just plain insulting. (Greenpoints does make an exception for FTD.com; they pay 50 points per dollar there, but that's still just 6%...why earn 6% when you can earn 10% for shopping at FTD through Ebates.com or Giving2Gether.org??)

Not only are Greenpoints' shopping rates laughable, their merchant selection leaves much to be desired. They carry only around 120 merchants, and some of the big ones like Walmart, KBToys, and Buy.com aren't offered (but hey! They have Soft Surroundings and Jerry Baker!).

Now what Greenpoints DOES have that's pretty unique is the online point crediting of offline grocery shopping. More info on that is here. Again, we're still talking about 10 points per dollar (1.2%), but if you were going to buy groceries anyway...

So: My advice to the folks at Greenpoints is, wake up and realize that the modern rewards shopper is smart enough to know that your points aren't worth that much. You have to have a more flexible platform that allows you to offer different rebates for each merchant -- we know you may only MAKE 2% on some of our purchases so giving us 1.2% may be fair then, but when, for example, you're making 30% on each ValueMags sale and only paying your members 1.2%... c'mon, we're just not that stupid. And let's see if we can offer a wider variety of merchants!

Giving us a voice in the future of the site is a start. Now, please... listen to us.