Automatic Cashback Cell Phone Offers

View PDF | Print View
by: Tricia Bacon
Total views: 0
Word Count: 727
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 Time: 4:19 AM
0 comments

For anybody not familliar with incentivised cellular phone offers the term automatic cashback may seem a little peculiar or confusing. I mean, why would a cellular telephone company give automatic cash-back, and what is meant by automatic?

First up it is critical to know that if you take out a mobile phone contract, it is not with a single company, you are effectively dealing with two (except if you go direct to the network operator). Typically you will purchase your cellphone from a store, be they a store on the high street or on the web. You will then be obliged to pay a monthly fee to your network provider. The relationship between the shop and the network provider is commission based. That is to say the mobile network company pays commission to the store.

The mobile phone store cannot change the monthly cost charged by the network, this is fixed. To help sell more contracts the store will typically invest some of their commission they charge on incentivised deals for the customer. A few years back it was sufficient for them to merely give away a free mobile. This after all was a time when cellular phones were really expensive and were a a kind of status symbol.

These days however, things work differently. Cellphones are a lot more common and are a lot cheaper, so, mobile stores are forced to attract their customers with increasingly tempting incentives, such as free laptops or even free televisions.

Of course a few consumers do not want free gifts, they want the cheapest phone promotion possible, and this is where automatic cashback is used. As the store is unable to lower the monthly rental of a mobile rental, they offer to hand back some money to the consumer up front. So, for instance, if the consumer tries to obtain a Thirty Percent discount in line rental, the cellular phone retailer will calculate the value of thediscount and give back the cash imediately.

Automatic cashback deals are not to be confused with free line rental or cash back by redemption deals, in which customers have to claim cashback later on in the contract. Because of unscrupilous terms and conditions attached to these claims for cash back many consumers failed to receive their refund, and so lost faith in the cash back by redemption offers.

So, the automatic cash-back deal was born. These offers offered more realistic savings than the cash-back by redemption deals, but, the refund was guaranteed. It was automatic, paid to the consumer as soon as the mobile contract was signed, and so, the term automatic cash-back was used to describe this kind of mobile contract.

For customers looking for an automatic cashback mobile phone offer, without doubt, the best place to locate one is online. Whilst it is possible to find one of these offers on the high street it is far less likely. For a start, the high street cell phone retailers cannot generally offer such good offers or incentives simply because their running costs are a lot higher than those of their online competition (though their customer service is normally better). Furthermore, it is not easy for stores to make money with these offers. The profit margins with automatic cash back deals are so tight that they require constant monitoring, taking into account changes in the amounts of commission paid and the cost of the phones themselves. This often means that the shelf life of a given deal is quite short, once that ends you (as a customer) have to wait for the next automatic cashback promotion to come along.

For this reason phone comparison sites are usually the best way to find an automatic cashback offer , as they will show all offers by all online shops on one page. These deals are obscure, representing a tiny amount of the total number of deals on offer, and, you will have to accept an older less well featured handset in order to obtain one. But for the thrifty, automatic cash-back offers are by far the cheapest way to run a cell phone.

About the Author

If you are after a great Mobile Phone with Automatic Cashback deal then be sure to have a look at fabfonedeals.

Comments

Add Comment