Do you feel this usage of smallprint and lack of contact somewhat shady?
Well, when this thing started I read the promotion conditions and knew it was working like that. I don't think it was too much to ask to read that small excerpt. To me it was clear that I had to act quickly.
I mean.... there are certainly so many ways customers get screwed over - I'm just not sure if this promotion was particularly scummy.
Oh and I also used one voucher today and still got my 5er discount. Might be a £ only thing!?
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Voucher?
This one was an offer sub-page you had to click on, and it applied the discount to your account itself. If you picked to pay via paypal at the steam checkout, it would give you the £5 back automatically. No actual vouchers or viewable discount icons were involved.
My issue is more that even if you know there is a limit, the consumers are given no way to see if the offer is still valid. In this case, the offer expired within 24 hours of it being issued, but people were still able to apply the offer to their account even after it had stopped, giving a false impression (and generating transactions to Paypal regardless).
Transparency is important, and an automatic email notice to say it no longer applies would have gone a long way given how sudden the change was.
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Uhm... sorry... for my apparently wrong use of the word voucher...?! Not a native speaker. (and a bad student, too :/)
I don't remember how paypal called this 5€ "cashback" on the bill, but when I did my paypal checkout, I got a notification that a 5€ "coupon" will be applied. I was looking for a message like that, since I didn't get this "5€ coupon" message when I tried purchasing something the first time. So I did not finish my first purchase.
I also used all 3 offers after the first 24hours. Pretty sure they must have extended that offer then.
Though I still think that reading the "small print" was not too much to ask, I would however agree now that they didn't make it clear enough, how these "coupons" worked. Just because I was a bit more careful, doesn't mean it should be expected of everyone. I think they could have just given a visual help about how this "5€ cashback" appears on the bill later.
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Didn't expire within a day at all as I used it yesterday with no issue
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For me it still worked yesterday or so. The PP acc and Steam acc region must be valid for the offer though.
Example: DE PP, DE Steam, DE coupon => works
RO PP, RO Steam, DE & AT & FR/ES coupon => nope; endless moaning at PP support got the 5€ applied post-factum
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I think it was only limited by a cash cap, but with the math of £5 per applicable purchase, it worked out at just under 10,000 applicants. It was in the small-print, but the issue was more that the offer was applied to accounts as a kind of invisible tag that triggered when you made your £20+ purchase. When it expired nobody was notified, and there was no way to check.
It seems like it could have easily been an innocent mistake, just lacking foresight. I actually remember looking for the offer on their front page at a later point but being unable to find it, but the direct link still led to an active offer page. They might have removed it from the listings, but neglected to deactivate the offer page itself (which still reported successfully applying to your account if you logged in and clicked inside that page).
It was a nice offer and it doesn't feel malicious, but certainly seems a little clumsy y'know? Just noticed that someone got a £5 credit to their paypal account directly when they messaged customer support. It's messy but seems well-meaning.
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as a kind of invisible tag that triggered when you made your £20+ purchase. When it expired nobody was notified, and there was no way to check.
It's not an invisible tag, you see it on the wallet page.
It expired in the sense that people couldn't claim it anymore, from what I know.
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You mean why didn't people buy £20 of cash straight into their steam wallet, using paypal?
I considered it myself, but for some reason it felt like that might be an exception to the offer.
In the end, paying £20+ for items or paying £20 for steam wallet funds would have the same result, either £5 cashback or no cashback at all. The issue is a miscommunication that might actually be related to them not taking the page itself down (only removing it from the searchable offers).
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Mhh, okay. In the communities I had read about it people tried very fast if it works on wallet, too. And to increase the discount they came up with either Steam Enhanced or the javascript function to buy exactly 20€ wallet. Also it was possible to use several offers (at least for same currency).
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Cautionary Update! :
Someone reported that they were still able to get their cashback, and I tested it last night and found that the UK offer still appears to be redeemable. Proceed with caution, but it seems that they may have potentially re-opened it? According to someone in the comments section of the link, if the discount does not apply and you had previously attached the offer to your account, you can try to contact their customer service and they could potentially credit your paypal account. Again, be careful!
Original Post :
TL;DR :
The £5 cashback offer expired prior to the given date and they have not alerted people who applied the discount to their accounts. Making a purchase no longer gives you the cash, be careful.
Full details :
As some of you may have been aware, there was a recent paypal offer where people from the UK, Germany and Japan could get their equivalent of £5 cash back if they spent £20 or more in a single transaction on steam. When I checked yesterday on google before making a purchase, this had expired. While originally the expiration date on the offer was 05/07, the small print also said "Or until we pay out £45,000 in total". As a result, the offer expired within one day of it being issued and the 'apply for this offer' page remained available for those with a direct link (but seems to have been removed from the searchable offers), neglecting to notify anyone whose account had the offer applied to it.
The google-stumbled source
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