I received a mailer from helloPay today. It purports to be giving away $10 for free. The condition is having to top up your helloPay account with S$50. Alright, sounds good. I top up $50 into my helloPay account and they will top it up with another $10 right? That would be perfect.
Moving on to the fine print, it says the $10 is given in the form of a Lazada voucher code. Immediately i sensed something wrong, and i quickly recalled, a Lazada voucher code is nothing but a promo code. I have made 3 purchases on Lazada so far and every time, i have never failed to find (simply by Googling) a promo code FOR FREE, and the discount quantum have always been at least $10 for a minimum purchase amount of $50. If you can almost always get Lazada promo/voucher codes for free, why go through the trouble of spending $50 upfront to top up your helloPay account before you even know if there will be something you need to purchase?
The fine print even says that only the first 100 who does the topping up will get the voucher code. Yeah, right. I’m pretty sure everyone who does the topping up will get it, else they will be generating negative sentiments among their precious and still small customers base.
By the way, you may not have any idea what helloPay is about, and i’m doing them a favour by introducing them to you. They’re essentially a PayPal copycat (if you don’t know what PayPal is about, nevermind). The payment gateway market is getting very crowded these days. So far, Lazada is the only website on which you can utilize a helloPay account (they’re probably under the same parent company, or related at least). I think it is very hard for them to loop in more merchants because everyone wants to be their own payment gateway.
Anyway, i thought this was quite a “creative” marketing approach, which i’m sure will work very well, and i’m just sharing this as a reference for all. Marketing tactics are getting increasingly clever and complex.
