ipoints.co.uk

So many of the pay-to-do-things sites have died their death recently. What do I mean? Let's look at the list shall we. First we had some big names going bust, including that ill fated clothing shop! Then came the downfall of the ad bar schemes, with Alladvantage leaving a lot of people bitter. Then came the whole acrecby scandal (who owe me £30), and not long after swapitshop closed their doors too. Next up was the reward scheme sites, with my favourite WebRewards currently on its death bed!

So what's all this got to do with iPoints I hear you cry! Well, I got my iPoints from two such sources. Firstly I had around £10 in my Surfmiles account when they died (for about the third time I think, but this time there will be no resurection!). Funnily though, my £10 turned in to 35 iPoints. Great I thought, until I checked the iPoints site. A £10 voucher from iPoints cost 150 points, so somewhere along the line Surfmiles had pulled a fast one! Anyway, I forgot about the site for a while longer, until I heard of WebRewards imminent death. I had around 700 Webrewards, and initially I just thought I would choose a gift from the site. I could have had two cinema tickets, or even a novelty condom holder, but I decided I would add these to my iPoints account, as this was one of the option that Webrewards offered.

This gave me a total of somewhere around 220 iPoints, but to get a DVD from them I need about 280. So, god forbid, I was going to have to revert to the normal way of geting my iPoints. And this is where, to me, the whole thing fell down.

The iPoints ethos is to reward shopping, or more accurately to reward loyal shopping. I'm not the biggest online shopper in existence. Infact, I'm not even a medium online shopper. so far in 9 months of having the net I have bought things from Amazon, Streetsonline and some small printer supplies company. iPoints seem to have a number of smaller retailers, rather than the very large companies. I guess the largest companies don't need to bother though.

Heres a few examples of the companies and what rewards they offer........

101CD - Earn 3 ipoints for every £10 spent
bol.com - Earn 10 ipoints for every £10 spent
OTC - Earn 10 ipoints for every £100 spent
evesham.com - Earn 1 ipoints for every £10 spent
RAC - Earn 55 ipoints when you join
Claims Direct - If you have had an accident in the last 3 years that wasn't your fault, complete the claim form and receive 350 ipoints

By the way, don't get me started on the whole Claims Direct lot. My solution would invole them and a large shotgun, but thats not relevant for this op.

iPoints also offer a free section where you can get iPoints for things which don't involve the transfer of cash! Some examples of these are

Lineone - 50 free ipoints for registering
iPoints - Earn 10 ipoints

While I'm on the examples bit, why don't I list a few of their rewards too, then I can get stuck in to the writing bit!

£10 High Street Vouchers (Various stores) - 150 points
Music CD - 200 ipoints
Video - 220 ipoints
DVD - 275 ipoints
Computer games - 500 ipoints
Toshiba 28" Widescreen TV - 10000 ipoints
Formula 1 Racing - 52350 ipoints
A year's subscription to New Scientist - 1710 ipoints
Condom Holder - 115 ipoints
UCI Cinemas - 80 ipoints

Now obviously I may have listed some of the more exotic rewards there, but COME ON! You get at most about 1 iPoint per £1 you sepnd. So, to get yourself that subscription to New Scientist at the very least you are going to have to spend £1710. And that's if you buy all your stuff from bol.com. This weeks issue of New Scientist cost £2.20, so 52 lots of that is £114.40. That works out as a 6.7% reward. Not all that bad, but not all that great either when you bear in mind that bol.com are the highest rewarders at one iPoint per £1 spent. A lot of the others give you 1 iPoint per £10 spent, making the reward ten times less.

Also some of the free rewards give you an obscene amount of iPoints compared to the rewards for shopping. You can sign up for Lineone, never ever use them as your ISP and get 50 iPoints. To get 50 iPoints for shopping you would have to spend between £50 and £500.

Another bad thing is that iPoints used to offer free iPoints every day to visit, normally 2 iPoints for visiting a site. 2 iPoints sounds paltry, but then you have to consider that you could spend £20 and only get 2 iPoints.

And yet another bad thing is that the iPoints you get take up to a month to come in to your account. If they ever do. Most of the free iPoints don't make it clear how to claim you iPoints, and half of them I never see.

So is there really any point in using this website? On the one hand, if you use one of their chosen retailers often then you may as well get something for it. Just don't expect much. Hopefully with half their competitors dead they should flourish, lets hope that the idea of the whole online rewards scheme is not flawed, and all sites are doomed to failure. It happened with the ad bar!

But as long as they stay open long enough to give me my DVD I'll be happy, and all credit to them, as this style of site go they have done a very good job.

Definitely the best reward scheme.