Hello.
Spring has begun. This is felt in the news, where the number of insane acts rolls over. Either in the subway, a sick person will push a teenager under a train, or someone will begin to sort things out for no reason and demand the president to his carpet in Khrushchev. Spring.
If you think that spring is not felt in the electronics market, then it is completely in vain, it manifests itself in everything. It may seem to you that there is a crisis around, you need to worry about sales efficiency, build a long-term strategy, but this is only an appearance. For large companies, life flows completely differently, and other indicators come to the fore. I have always envied those who work in companies where gender composition is important, the same attitude towards all employees (even when they mow), ecology (collecting plastic bottle caps is more important than sales!). A sort of pioneer camp, where you can come off in full, and most importantly, that at the end of the shift you will have nothing for it.
I was looking forward to the beginning of March and discounts from Wildberries, the site decided to arrange a price war in Russia, we wrote about this separately.
Sbermegamarket (SMM) was also waiting for this and decided to take a chance – to launch discounts on a huge number of goods, including electronics. As they say, the price war will write off all the mistakes, and no one will look at the P&L tables. The main thing is to show that the turnover has grown multiple times and this is easily achievable. It is difficult to imagine that billions of rubles will have to be burned to achieve this goal, destroy your service and kill sales for years to come. Spring is a time for decisive action.
Sberbank decided to go for broke and offer the market discounts that no one has ever been able to give to customers. During March or until the expiration of the money allocated for the action (this moment is not controlled in any way, but more on that later), you can get various goods with a discount of up to 41%. The discount here is bizarrely designed, these are points of the “Thank you” program from Sberbank – that is, you buy a product, and the corresponding points are credited to your account of the program. Then they can be spent on the purchase of other goods (up to 99%). You cannot buy goods with a credit card, in theory you can connect to the program with a card from another bank, but in fact this feature does not work. There are also limits on how much money you can spend.
Unfortunately, no matter what card you have and what bank you have, registration in the program causes problems.
The infrastructure of Sberbank is not designed for such an influx of users; no one prepared it for this. However, this applies in general to SMM and the work of the company, logistics and delivery of goods raised questions even before that – often the goods were lost, orders were canceled and bonuses were awarded for a problem with it. Now let’s imagine that you and your current staff can’t handle a certain number of orders. And you have a constant number of problems and rejections that leave your customers dissatisfied. What will happen if you hold a promotion, invest money in it and within a month the number of orders will increase at least three times? Provided that the logistics and your capacities have not changed in any way. This is a snowball that will bury your structure under it, the number of problems will increase, and the speed of their solution will decrease. Your employees simply won’t be able to work anymore, they were already working at their limit. The increase in the number of orders is not even a stress test, but simply an attempt to break the whole structure.
Want to add some difficulty to this level of the “game”? Let’s impose a promotion on the time when Sber changes old bonuses from the loyalty program to new ones. To guarantee problems not only in their diocese, but at the same time in the general loyalty program for the entire Sberbank – so to speak, bring it down. Which is what we see by how people can’t register for the program.
The rules of the promotion state that “500 million rewards” are given out at this stage.
You can use common sense and assume that the total amount of discounts cannot exceed half a billion rubles. But what one reward is equal to is unclear, moreover, the CMM does not have any tools to keep track of how many products are selected at the moment. They can do this only once a day, summing up their sales (if I’m wrong, then correct me). Any offer given to a user with cashback must be processed or cancelled. That is, at the moment when the CMM decides that it has distributed enough money, the sales already made will need to be canceled. What do you think, what will be the loyalty of a person who bought a product from you at a discount, but did not receive it? He will think that you have swindled him, and I still put it mildly.
Overspending per share is built into it automatically and cannot be avoided. The only question is at whose expense this problem will be solved. The size of the hidden discount is such that the offer becomes very, very attractive to other players, it is profitable for them to buy goods on SMM and then put them on their shelves. Let’s evaluate this point with an example.
The easiest way to compare is the 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 16/512 GB). Its cost in the US is $1,999 plus taxes, for example, let’s take New York with a tax of 8.875% and get a total cost of $2,176. That at the current rate will be 165 thousand rubles.
I did not look for different prices in SMM, I took the first offer that came across.
It turns out that the price is 232 thousand rubles, and almost 93 thousand rubles will be returned to you as cashback. In total, you will pay 139 thousand rubles for a laptop, that is, 26 thousand rubles less than if you bought it in America. There were no such prices in Russia and there is not, it’s just an attraction of unprecedented generosity.
It is important to note here that you will receive “Thank you” points only after a week, but this does not play a big role, they will come to you anyway. Now to add more fire, as part of this promotion, there are additional discount coupons that can be found on the network. That is, for some goods, you can reduce the cost by another 10-15 percent. And it’s just a holiday.
For example, Galaxy S23 Ultra can be taken for 65,500 rubles.
You need to look at the offers, but in general it turns out, no doubt, inexpensively, the only question is what to spend so many points on later. But in addition to shopping, there are gas stations and other opportunities to spend these Thank You points.
For buyers, this is directly heaven on earth, however, the resellers from Avito were the first to orient themselves, they buy dozens of goods, immediately change prices – this category finds profitable offers faster than others. I don’t need anything, but when I look at the cost of equipment, my hands itch to buy something. Such offers are very rare, and CMM management solves a simple task – to splurge, show an increase in the number of users, an increase in turnover. And the fact that the conditional ruble is being sold for 90 kopecks does not bother anyone. Surprisingly, this story is not about efficiency, not about building a business in the long term. Only the solution of momentary tasks for reports to the top about how the business is growing. But it does not grow at all, but brings a bunch of new problems and negative experience for users. This approach never ceases to amaze me, because this is a scorched earth tactic, and they burn it not for competitors, but for themselves.
And as the icing on the cake, most of the smaller vendors that sell merchandise on SMM have contracted their employees to buy back their own merchandise. That is, this is an ideal scheme, they get their goods back, and after a week they also get points that can be spent on something else. Everything is paid by Sberbank.