I happened to notice the ‘Coles Plus Saver’ on the Coles site today.
For those unaware: it’s $7 a month, and it gives you 10% off, up to $50, on one shop per calendar month. (It looks to be completely separate from ‘Coles Plus’, btw, which is $19 a month and makes all deliveries free.)
Obviously you’ve got to average $70 in orders per month to make it worthwhile, but is there any other catch?
How do they make money on it? Does it actually increase people’s monthly spend with Coles? Or do they just rely on people forgetting about the discount or saving it for a bigger shop that they don’t get around to?
One thing that might be a catch is that it looks like you’ve got to sign up for FlyBuys and link it to the account. I don’t have a FlyBuys account, so I’m not aware of what exactly you’re signing away with it, but I would have thought Coles would be getting all your data anyway just with online ordering. Does FlyBuys membership give them permission to sell your purchasing data to third parties, or otherwise use it differently?
FlyBuys gives explicit permission to track you, a unique identifier, and TOS that they control. With credit card transactions and online ordering there are regulations they have follow. Not that they’re guaranteed to do that, but in theory anyway. They also get your in-store purchases this way, even if you pay cash, so long as you scan the card. I’m fairly sure it does also go to third parties but I’m not in a position to check TOS right now.