Check out the new card on the block – Standard Chartered Singpost Platinum Visa Credit Card.
I’m pretty excited when I saw this. Unfortunately, I’ve just completed my online shopping and shipping before this card came along.
Nonetheless, let’s check out what this card can potentially offer.
If you choose to apply for this card before 31 July 2012, you can get $80 cashback. This is provided you have only enjoyed one previous same $80 cashback promotion from Standchart.
The main highlight of this card is of course, spending online. If you are a new vPost customer, you can enjoy $20 off your first vPost shipment (for the first 100 new vPost customers every month). However, many other cards offer the same or similar privileges.
I like this next benefit though, 15% off subsequent vPost shipments (for USA, Europe and Japan). Again, there are similar privileges offered by other cards, but the reason why I like it is because the 15% is the higher end of the usual 10%-15% discount offered and doesn’t seem to come with the usual minimum shipping fee requirement. As we know shipping fees are usually the fees that makes up quite a significant sum of our online purchases.
There is also a 50% off repacking service fee.
On top of this, you’ll get 2% cashback for your online purchases. 2% cashback for online purchases sounds good enough if you do not have a card to accumulate your spending on since most online purchases doesn’t come with discount or cashback, except for points accumulation. There is a cap of $50 cashback monthly, so it makes sense not to charge more than $2,500 of online purchases to this card. There is, however, a minimum spend of $500 per month requirement to enjoy the cashback.
For Clout Shoppe, it’s 8% off for a minimum spend of $200 in a single receipt.
For SingPost, there is a 15% off SpeedPost EMS (Package) Published Rates.
5% off SmartPac (minimum 3 pieces).
25% off Self Storage Solutions.
10% off Thematic MyStamp collections and Premium Gifts.
For offline purchases, if your current lifestyle monthly spending charged to your credit card exceeds $500 and if you spend a significant amount on groceries at supermarket, the 6% cashback at selected supermarkets such as NTUC, Cold Storage and Giant will reap more benefits.
In other words, if you do not spend more than $500 a month, or if you are accumulating your spending on another card that gives you another benefit that is more beneficial to your lifestyle or if you don’t spend that much on supermarket groceries, then this benefit means little to you. Further more, there may be other cards that allows you to get between 2%-5% discount or cashback usually with no minimum spend. Do take note that there are times with clever spending in conjunction with promotions, this percentage may go up to 10%. In such cases, it’d make more sense to take advantage of 10%, rather than simply blindly accumulating the spending on this SingPost card.
Assuming you spend $500 every month on groceries at NTUC, and you accumulate them in this card and stop using other cards, that means instead of getting the usual 5% depending on the card you use, you can potentially increase your benefit to 6%, 1% more! How would this translate in dollars and cents? For a $500 grocery spending, 6% would give us a $30 return and the usual 5% would be $25 return. A potential increase of $5. Not fantastic but not too bad either. So it really depends on your lifestyle.
And because there is a cap of $50 cashback every month, it doesn’t make sense to charge more than $833, assuming if you do spend up to this amount on groceries. Any other amounts in excess, do charge to other cards to get more benefits out of your purchases.
For other retail purchases, the cashback is set at 0.25% cashback. However, if you are spending for any other items that doesn’t give any distinctive benefits, most cards offer 0.5%, which is 2x more compared to 0.25% offered by this new card.
This card is good if you are a vPost user, or an online shopper. Personally I welcome the idea behind this card because with the increasing usage of online purchases, there is indeed a potential market for this. And for the consumers who have started and changed their shopping habits, this is a potential card to to help defray some costs of the shipping fees. And that is why, in terms of offline spending, this card may be lacking in some of its privileges as compared to other cards.
The other way to use this card is, if you are a huge online purchaser already and had charged a minimum of $500 to this card (which you probably would, considering the 15% off shipping plus 2% cashback for online purchases if assuming you have charged $500 to the card for the month already) and happen to be doing some grocery shopping at the selected supermarkets, do use this card at the supermarket because you’d be getting 6% cashback, provided you do not have any other better privileges for using other cards.
