on perfection
Lyoness –An Honest Review
In their own words, Lyoness is: a global loyalty rewards program dedicated to providing a rewarding and mutually beneficial relationship between their unparalleled community of international shoppers and merchants. A free Lyoness membership provides shoppers with exclusive benefits from online shopping, gift card purchases, the Lyoness cash back card and mobile cash back with over 29,000 merchants at more than 150,000 locations!
Nobody and nothing, including a business entity, is perfect.
That being said, there’s a lot to Lyoness, and I intend to go over the main pros and cons of the world’s largest shopping community without sugarcoatin’ it.
Pros
- Free, lifetime membership to the world’s largest shopping community
- Benefit from group shopping that does not take away from the business, but rather helps business, unlike Groupon
- The company was started in Austria in 2003. Longevity matters.
- Meets rigorous certifications: TUV (basically, Europe’s version of the BBB) and ISO
- A portion of every purchase goes to charity: Greenfinity and The Child & Family Foundation.
- You can triple-up your savings: with your individual loyalty cards (keychain tags), discount promo codes and by using your airlines or any other credit card you happen to use
- You can support local businesses in your area, and across the US, as well as shop at your favorite national chain stores
- Your rewards include cash back and then some
- Does not require that you spend much outside, if at all, of your personal norm
- Helps both the merchant and the consumer benefit (win-win)
- Online shopping is easy
- No risk involved — No credit check needed as it is not a credit card — free membership at no cost to you
- You are paying the exact same (if not less, given the coupon codes) that you would if you were not a Lyoness shopper.
Cons
- Part of the reason that the benefits to Lyoness are so wonderful is that they happen to also be rather complicated – it takes at least an hour to really sit down and thoroughly understand all 10 benefits of shopping within the system. Thoroughly understanding the compensation structure is not necessary to reap the benefits. (Part of the reason that I started this blog is to make it easy for those in the shopping community to understand the compensation plan — all 10 benefits — one at a time. So stay tuned)
- While I do believe that eventually this network concept will encourage consumers to shop locally, until the shopping community has grown to a certain extent in each area of the US, shoppers will mainly rely on online shopping, and using gift cards to large national chains.
- While it’s easy to shop online for the majority of your purchases – when you need to buy gas or go to Walmart, this is rather an involved process which requires funding your purchase account, and then waiting for FedEx to deliver your cards. Money is tight for a lot of folks, and not everybody can wait around for a week while their $300 in gift cards shows up. I would think that a 10 year old European company would have figured this one out already.
- Signing up a friend should be as easy is 1-2-3. Send them an email, and sign them up right? No such luck. As the recommender, you do have to pay the $1.50 in signup fees in order to sign up your friend, and in order to do so, you have to go through the whole “funding your purchase account thing” which involves snapping a picture of your check, made out to Lyoness USA and sending it in with your member ID attached, waiting 3-4 days for it to go through, and then re-logging in to sign up your friend. This IMHO, is a bit of a pain in the tookus.
Conclusion
All of that being said, I believe in the vision of the company and what they are aiming to do. They’ve created, mathematically speaking, a sustainable, self-perpetuating system in regards to the compensation/rewards which most loyalty programs on an individual basis, cannot compare to, since they are a network of many local and large businesses, rather than one business. That aspect in and of itself, lends to the idea of a global community. The rewards are so beneficial and extensive that it makes sense why the members of this shopping community are as they say “fiercely loyal”. If you haven’t already, check out this video on the 10 benefits of shopping with Lyoness. The video is password-protected; email ourladyofshopping@gmail.com for a comprehensive explanation of all 10 benefits. If you’re not interested in referring others, or “building a business shopping for a living”, that’s certainly okay– shop til you drop, then! Might as well earn some free money while you’re at it.
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our lady of shopping 