purchase from every tenant and 1% from any shop worldwide including online shops. Besides, they give 8% reward points to the balance of the card. All the points can be either exchanged for offers from the catalogue Only for friends or used to pay for the shopping in partner shops. The card is issued by Ikano Bank.
The developer uses most up-to-date marketing tools to promote its loyalty program. To launch it, Ingka Centres invited a stylist and designer Alexander Rogov in order to create a virtual image of friendship and unity. He was assisted by a singer and a blogger Rita Dakota, an actress Irina Gorbacheva, a photographer Alexandra Burimova, a TV host Maria Belova to create the sketches, which were later commented on by Instagram followers of these celebrities. The comments were supposed to be personal stories about their own friends with hashtags #megafriends and #allgoodthingsstartwithfriends and as a result, a few powerful tags were created to be used in the merchandise.
MEGA’s app in App Store is rated 4.7 based on 1.7K comments. There are a lot of negative ones, which is common and typical for all apps as people are likely to share a negative experience rather than a positive one. Users complain that the message “something went wrong” pops up too often, they cannot upload their receipts and use all the advantages of the loyalty program. One of the recent comments states, “The interface is rather nice, yet the app is horrible! Receipts get scanned every other time only, shops cannot be found, and points are not added. Of all the shopping done over a month ago, only IKEA’s points came through”. And another comment, “I have acquired a lot of points in MEGA Friends program, yet I cannot use them on anything nice as I must register in VKontakte, which doesn’t work when I try to do it, nor the staff who promotes the program”. While users giving 5 points out of 5 explain that the app is user friendly and easy to use. Many praise MEGA as a mall, rather than a program.
In da club with Afimall
Another mall, which is developing the club idea, is Afimall. Their program is called AFI CLUB and has an app. As most other Russian programs, it also has flaws: it requires a client to take pictures of the receipts and download them into the app within 72 hours after the purchase. Not to mention that the picture must clearly show the name of the legal entity, Tax ID, cash register number and final cost. This means the user must invest a lot of their personal time and the hassle is really annoying, especially if the app is malfunctioning, which happens more than often, based on the comments for different malls.
Reward points are added on purchases over 300 rubles, one point per each 100 rubles. If you want to use them, choose compliment, click Activate and enter the confirmation code from the description. This app also helps to navigate in a shopping center and give access to private functions. Different profiles mean different privilege levels.
Representatives of the mall reported earlier that the app is downloaded 70K times a year. Its Apple Store grade is rather high, 4.8, based on 1.4K comments. And again, there are more negative recent posts as users complain that they cannot download their receipts and get the points, while the navigation system fails half of the times. However, there are lucky users too, who are happy with the app.