Virgin Megastores offer discounts via mobile coupons
Rating: get yours in-store now
By Annie Turner
In collaboration with Cellfire, Virgin Megastores in New York and California have recently launched a campaign using mobile coupons to attract customers into their shops. Customers can enjoy discounts of up to 20% on products including CDs, DVDs, books and memory sticks or cards for their mobile phones by redeeming the coupons. Virgin partnered with mobile coupon company Cellfire for this project.
To have access to the coupons, customers have to download Cellfire’s to their phones either by sending a text to a short code or from the Cellfire website. Once the application is installed, Cellfire automatically uploads coupons to the phone on a regular basis.
Apparently the coupons are easy for the customer to find, because they are stored within the application: coupons that arrive by SMS can be hard to find on the phone. Once the customer finds an offer they are interested in, they click on it and receive a coupon on their phone which they can present to receive a discounted price, verified by the five digit code in the middle of the coupon. Cellfire says that the redemption rate for mobile coupons are up to 20 times that of paper ones as well as being more eco-friendly
Hollywood Video, EMI Music, Domino’s Pizza, TGI Friday’s, and 1-800-flowers.com also use Cellfire’s coupons.
Great idea that has been surprisingly slow to take off, but Cellfire seems to have got two crucial ingredients right. Firstly, a simple to use application that can be downloaded by anyone and secondly getting over the hurdle of many outlets not having readers for mobile barcodes. In its first year of trading, Cellfire says it’s issued 4 million. One can only wonder, as mobile coupons proliferate, how long it will be before someone figures out a way of defrauding the system?

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