There were two “incredible” “shopping” deals this weekend. Both Incredible and Shopping are in quotes because they were not supposed to happen and it’s not really shopping at all!

The first deal was from Future Shop where you could trade in any current generation game (including old sports games from past years) and get one of the new AAA titles that have released for the holiday season – for free. These games would normally go for $50-$60 and hold line ups for midnight openings. Many people would have paid full price with REAL money to buy these games! Yet, a large number of thrifty “shoppers” (i.e., RFDers) were able to score the games for free. I’m not sure why Future Shop decided to put on this promotion, as the majority of people who took advantage of the deal already knew that Future Shop bought and sold used games.

While the Future Shop deal may or may not have been a mistake, the second one surely is. Samsung put up a website for Note users where they could submit their serial number for $600 in vouchers (including $25 in Google Play credit). In theory, that’s a good reward for Note customers. But it turns out that:
1. It wasn’t restricted to Note serial numbers; most Samsung cellphone serial numbers ended up working, and even printer serial numbers!
2. You could register a serial number again if you entered a space (i.e., the serial number matching was not trimmed)
3. You could get lists of Galaxy Note serial numbers online
4. There was (seemingly) no hard limit to the credits being give out.

You had people on SlickDeals (and RFD) accumulating thousands of dollars of credit for Google Play by using scripts. You could use the credit to buy any of the soft products (i.e., no hardware). In fact it was like printing free money because presumably you could release a “private” app on Google Play that costs thousands of dollars and then buy it with your free credit.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: deals, google, marketing, shopping