To be honest I’m somewhat amused that I’m annoyed enough to write an article about this. The situation is that Amazon.co.uk is ending their partnership Halifax (really Lloyds) so customers no longer get any loyalty points.
Now it was a pretty cool credit card, every three to four months I would get a £15 Amazon.co.uk gift voucher to spend on whatever I wanted on the site, so sometimes I bought books or times it could end up being DVDs, or even electronics. At the end of the day it was quite a cushy loyalty program.
So what now? Well Amazon.co.uk is looking for another partner for a credit card but they haven’t got anyone yet so the best thing to do is to find an alternative credit card.
Loyalty to an airline is out of the question because I’ll never just fly with the one company, same with hotels and I don’t want to be offered a whole load of discounts I’ll never use.
So time to get looking.
As a test case I’ll be using a newish which is Hellsing Ultimate vol4. It has an RRP of £15 and Amazon.co.uk sell it for £8.98.
My first thought was Nectar.com since they offer loads of ways to collect points and they do offer ways to spend your points including books and DVDs. There CD and DVD store is powered by CD-WOW. Now they are charing £14.99 for the DVD or though Nectar, 3000 points. Now if we remove some (or most of the complexity at looking at Nectar) and focus only on the collection of point using the credit card you would find that they charge 1 point for every pound you spend but it can get a little more complicated…
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Double Nectar points for the first 3 months.
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2 points for every full £1 you spend on your Card with Nectar participating partners so you can collect up to 4 points per full £1 at most Nectar partners when you use your Nectar Credit Card and Nectar loyalty card at the same time.
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1 point for every full £1 you spend on the Card everywhere else.
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Collect MorePoints - 500 extra Nectar points for every £500 you spend on your Card, each calendar month. on top of your usual base and bonus points.
So in other words if you shop at Sainsburys, get your petrol from BP yada yada ya, it does add up quite a fair bit but there are some downsides. One it’s an American Express credit card (I don’t think every shop accepts American Express yet such as play.com) and the other thing is that you can be limited in some categories, for example you’re very limited in what books you can get, and imported books are a no no.
So who else then, well after some browsing on the net I found this article: http://bit.ly/bp1Jb. The concept of not having to check what your offers are does appeal to me greatly (less thinking is always good) but alas the scheme isn’t up and running yet
On a whim I decided to look at MBNA. I’ve had bad customer service from them in the past but I’m willing to over look that. They do offer a loyalty credit card that lets you get points, one point for every pound you spend, which more or less falls in line with everyone else but interestingly enough they let you turn those points into vouchers (on the lines of 4000 points = £20) that can be spent at hmv online, Marks and Spencer and other people (http://bit.ly/XnRMN) but no books any where and they are a bit vague on the whole thing unless you sign up
Now this is where I got stuck, because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look (a lot of store credit cards were ruled because you couldn’t spend the points online or they simply didn’t have a good selection.)
If you have a suggestion then let me know.
links
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Nectar credit card - http://www.nectar.com/earnpoints/americanexpress.nectar
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MBNA Reward card - https://wwwa.mbna.co.uk/apply/UKCCapp/Ctl/link?eid=E1C3CA3F