New VIP system

[Vindicare]

In an email I see they’re running a raffle sweepstakes for a Shazam! SDCC minifig. Entries are 50 points. That’s pretty cool. If they offer others, I may be more inclined to enter. 

[LegoFjotten]

First proper promo in *forever*... and it's gone in a few hours. The last promo that was available for me to actually take advantage of was in July 2019, the iconic VIP set that was available at launch... 

I must admit I feel like the VIP system is a complete waste now. There is nothing worthwhile to spend the points on except for "money of your next order". If it's gonna be like that, why don't throw us a bone and let us use points directly as discount when checking out?

[jpx]

14 hours ago, LegoFjotten said:

I must admit I feel like the VIP system is a complete waste now. There is nothing worthwhile to spend the points on except for "money of your next order". If it's gonna be like that, why don't throw us a bone and let us use points directly as discount when checking out?

I agree completely. But perhaps AFOLs aren't the majority of lego VIPs, and everybody else loves to be able to get a render of some odd detail of a harley Davidson.... 

And I bet that the new system dosen't integrate with their sales system, and that's why you have to get that voucher. 

[Vindicare]

On 4/19/2020 at 2:26 PM, LegoFjotten said:

First proper promo in *forever*... and it's gone in a few hours. The last promo that was available for me to actually take advantage of was in July 2019, the iconic VIP set that was available at launch... 

I must admit I feel like the VIP system is a complete waste now. There is nothing worthwhile to spend the points on except for "money of your next order". If it's gonna be like that, why don't throw us a bone and let us use points directly as discount when checking out?

I don’t know if you’ve used the new vouchers yet, but’s ridiculously easy. I was on the boat of complainers about the vouchers but after using it, I’m not too bothered by it. Sure it’s a weird additional step that I still don’t understand why they did it, but you just gotta click the voucher & the amount is sent to your account. 

[Hive]

On 4/19/2020 at 11:26 PM, LegoFjotten said:

First proper promo in *forever*... and it's gone in a few hours. The last promo that was available for me to actually take advantage of was in July 2019, the iconic VIP set that was available at launch... 

I must admit I feel like the VIP system is a complete waste now. There is nothing worthwhile to spend the points on except for "money of your next order". If it's gonna be like that, why don't throw us a bone and let us use points directly as discount when checking out?

My thoughts exactly. Absurdly disappointing. But they don't seem to care.

[JanetVanD]

Has anyone noticed that points don't always get awarded to purchases that are put on backorder? Apologies if this has been mentioned before; members of my LUG have only recently noticed this ommission happing regularly to quite a few people. Usually points not being applied to backordered items but sometimes also double points being applied only as single points. 

[paul_delahaye]

On 4/20/2020 at 1:10 PM, jpx said:

And I bet that the new system dosen't integrate with their sales system, and that's why you have to get that voucher. 

I think you are onto something here.  Either they have changed the provider for their reward points system and it does not update as quickly as the old one, or euqlly likely, they have changed their ERP/MRP system and the new one does not intergrate the point as easily.

It's not like the old points system did not work, or was just simple......when you checked out, you simply looked to see if you had any points.  Boom, £10 discount. 

[ShaydDeGrai]

On April 20, 2020 at 8:10 AM, jpx said:

And I bet that the new system dosen't integrate with their sales system, and that's why you have to get that voucher. 

I've seen several articles now claiming that the VIP rewards center is going to be revamped this week but somehow I suspect that the revamp is going to be far less than sweeping changes.  When it comes to "integrating" the system it seems like they can't even get Single-Sign-On down (for the non web geeks out there this just means you shouldn't have to login in twice, if shop.lego.com sends you to the rewards center, it should already know who you are and vise versa.  Core web technologies (SAML, OAuth, REST and JWT, etc.) solved this problem years ago and it just looks like a lack of interest in integration that TLG hasn't bothered to implement it).

I don't know what TLG has planned, but were I running the show the first update I'd make to the rewards center would be to eliminate it entirely.  Have all non-voucher rewards show up as regular items for purchase on the shop at home site as their own theme; gray-out purchase options for non-VIP members, anonymous users and users with insufficient points balance to "afford" the item; and update the main sales system to accept points directly for VIP Rewards items.   Reward items simply become something you add to your cart and pay for in points at check-out.

As for vouchers, I'd ditch them entirely.  When  checking out, the system knows who you are and how many points you've got (after any reward purchases) so it should be able to come back with a simple slider, spinner or text box control that says "How much of your current rewards balance of: $XXX would you like to apply to today's purchase?"  where you enter some number between zero and the max allowed value (either your max reward or the total purchase price whichever is lower) and the system deducts regional adjusted points accordingly.  Having worked with computers and web application (and NASA for that matter) I can assure you that this is not rocket science.

I don't see the point of making the VIP Rewards center its own little isolated fiefdom.  It feels like a lack of commitment to the program by TLG as a whole and it looks like TLG's internal political/organizational divisions are artificially creating distinctions without differences at the expense of the user experience.  Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'll log on tomorrow and a brilliant ew website will make me forgot all the prior flaws, but I'm not holding my breathe.

 

[jfbat]

So... I tried to use the voucher system for the first time, little over a month ago. It was not very satisfying, to say the least.

Redeeming VIP-points for a voucher was very easy - no problems there. I have been very careful to select the correct voucher: I wanted to use it on lego.com, so I chose that.

Then came July 1st. I had especially redeemed some of my Points to get a nice discount on the Corocodile train. Sadly, the system wasn't agreeing. I got a message that I could not use my voucher for this purchase. OK...

Next step was customer service. It was a pain in the @$$ to get any mail through, but after quite some attempts, I succeeded. We're now more than a month later, and I do understand that in these times it can take a bit longer, but I have not heard anything back. So tried to contact them again today - I cannot even get a mail through.

Tried to log in to my VIP-account, and something strange happened: I live in the Netherlands, but my account is apparently registered in Germany. I had to switch to Germany to get to my account. That's a first for me, I never had to do that! (also not, when redeeming points in June for that voucher)

I have a feeling where things go wrong: I signed up for Lego VIP a very long time ago, on holiday, in Germany. That never has been a problem, I have always used my account from the Netherlands, without issues. But apparently, the system now is quite peculiar about what region/country you're registered in. If it doesn't correspond with the country you're ordering from, VIP appearently doesn't work. Again: completely new for me, I've never had that issue before...

In my account, under points redeemed, it now says for the voucher:

• 20 € to be used at LEGO.com (DE)

It didn't say that on July 1st. It does not say so in the mail I received with the voucher-code in it, which by the way is completely in Dutch...

Somehow I can only spend the voucher in the German online store, which won't work as I cannot order there and have it delivered in the Netherlands.

 

Lego: please stop making things more "convenient" for us, and make things work again as they always did. As it is now, as a customer loyalty program it is working contra-productively for me...

 

[edit: with some perseverance, I finally succeeded in getting a mail through to customer service]

Edited August 10, 2020 by jfbat

[Huigberts Builds]

So a few months ago, I believe November last year, I went to the lego store here in the Netherlands and there I signed up for Lego VIP. I got an email, but on clicking it it kept loading for like forever. Eventually I lost my patience and stopped trying. That being said I didn't had a great first experience with S@H (didn't even tried vip then) before that as they canceled an order I made for my birthday a few years ago, without notifying me at all. That was a pretty big dissapointment so I didn't fell like trying again now when the site was giving me problems once more.

However, I was planning to buy diagon alley there very soon when it is announced with a potential gwp, so I thought I would give it another try. I thougt it would be wise to set things up so I could order right away when the time is there. Plus there was a second shot at the avengers tower gwp so I thought that would be a nice way to try things out.

I tried the email again from last November, which obviously was expired, so I requested a new email. Which was send right away. Sadly the site keeps loading, and I waited for like an hour. So I tried again, and again and again. About 20 new links later, (the site kept sending me new ones), I tried registering again, but oh no, the email was already registered. "But when can send you a new confirmation if you like." So about 10 new confirmation emails later I decided to just assign a new email adress to my account, that one isn't registered right? Well yes, but this time they just didn't send me an email at all. I got plenty of 2fa codes in the mail though. So I tried using my normal email again, which gave me another infinity loading link.

That's about when I gave up on my account ): and tried making a new account with a third email, as I assumed the second was now already associated with my original account, so I decided to start absolutely from scratch. But then I got an error message saying something went wrong and to please try again. Five tries later and I completely gave up. That site was a mess in 2013, it was a mess last year and it is a mess right now.

[jfbat]

On 8/10/2020 at 3:43 PM, jfbat said:

Tried to log in to my VIP-account, and something strange happened: I live in the Netherlands, but my account is apparently registered in Germany. I had to switch to Germany to get to my account. That's a first for me, I never had to do that! (also not, when redeeming points in June for that voucher)

[...] That never has been a problem, I have always used my account from the Netherlands, without issues. But apparently, the system now is quite peculiar about what region/country you're registered in. If it doesn't correspond with the country you're ordering from, VIP appearently doesn't work.

So, to come back to this: I since have been contacted by customer services, and indeed - it now does matter where your VIP account is registered. So: be aware!

That's where it went wrong for me, but the matter has since been solved satisfactorily, thanks to the excellent intervention from Lego Customer Services.

(my first mail was lost somewhere in the system, which explains that I did not get an answer in the first place - after my second mail, things were solved in little over a week)

 

[Clone OPatra]

Wow LEGO's website is incredibly broken. Though I live in Australia, I have an old USA account that I used when I lived there which still has a point balance. I log in, region set to USA, go to VIP center, region still USA - click the Phoenix minifigure sweepstakes and it changes my region to Australia and asks if I want to change to my account's home region of USA because I can't access the sweepstakes otherwise  When I change my region st that stage, it just shoots me back to the homepage and I'm stuck in a loop.

[JintaiZ]

23 hours ago, Clone OPatra said:

Wow LEGO's website is incredibly broken. Though I live in Australia, I have an old USA account that I used when I lived there which still has a point balance. I log in, region set to USA, go to VIP center, region still USA - click the Phoenix minifigure sweepstakes and it changes my region to Australia and asks if I want to change to my account's home region of USA because I can't access the sweepstakes otherwise  When I change my region st that stage, it just shoots me back to the homepage and I'm stuck in a loop.

Maybe you could get in touch with customer service.

[ShaydDeGrai]

On August 30, 2020 at 9:49 AM, Clone OPatra said:

Wow LEGO's website is incredibly broken. Though I live in Australia, I have an old USA account that I used when I lived there which still has a point balance. I log in, region set to USA, go to VIP center, region still USA - click the Phoenix minifigure sweepstakes and it changes my region to Australia and asks if I want to change to my account's home region of USA because I can't access the sweepstakes otherwise  When I change my region st that stage, it just shoots me back to the homepage and I'm stuck in a loop.

I'm having flashbacks to the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock when Scotty says "The more sophisticated they make the plumbing the easier it is to gum up the drain..."  I miss the old system, this one just makes me want to order from Amazon instead - and I have, Lego has lost a significant amount in direct sales from me since they switched over.

It was so much easier when I could just hand a physical card to the clerk at check out and have him say "You've got $900 in rewards, would you like to apply some of that to todays' purchases?"   No advance planning, no vouchers, no prorating by region, no need for a smart device or network connectivity,  just drop in when it's convenient and walk out with 'free' Lego.  As a consumer who has no interest in posters, park tickets, or lotteries for a chance to win some exclusive mini-fig, I feel this new system detracts (a lot) from the their shopping experience (compared to the program's prior incarnation) while brining nothing of note to the table for my supposed "VIP" status.  

It takes true brilliance to cook up a "customer loyalty program" that actively encourages a once loyal customer to shop elsewhere. 

[Clone OPatra]

23 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

Maybe you could get in touch with customer service.

Ultimately I was able to find a way around by going to the redeeming points section instead of the overall VIP section, and I would've contacted customer service if I couldn't have solved it, but I wanted to voice my experience here just to echo others in how complex and fruitless LEGO had made the whole VIP system. 

@ShaydDeGrai you've put it quite well, and ultimately the new system has turned me off of shopping directly with LEGO, or at least caring about my VIP card ever again. In fact I only decided to redeem points for a raffle because I was sure I'd never end up using them any other way.

Perhaps LEGO knows that it'll never compete with the sales at retailers, so it's diversified the VIP system, but then again it was never such a great deal. IMO the old system was just a nice, simple little "thank you" for shopping with them - an extra good feeling when a trip to a LEGO store was already a good feeling. Now that good feeling has been transformed into a bad feeling with the extra hassle just to redeem some points.

[Marvelous Spidey]

1 hour ago, Clone OPatra said:

Perhaps LEGO knows that it'll never compete with the sales at retailers, so it's diversified the VIP system, but then again it was never such a great deal. IMO the old system was just a nice, simple little "thank you" for shopping with them - an extra good feeling when a trip to a LEGO store was already a good feeling. Now that good feeling has been transformed into a bad feeling with the extra hassle just to redeem some points.

I think that kind of gets to the core of the issue for me: it used to at least feel fair and like a good deal. The points were easy to understand and were easy to redeem, and I feel like there were more 2X points opportunities. When LEGO revamped their website and the VIP rewards, they definitely made it look nicer but it can be harder to use. I'm not usually one of those who goes "back in my day it was great!" but they really took a step back when they updated (you can't even organize or comment on your wishlist anymore!). Now I buy most of my LEGO on Amazon, it's frequently 20% off and I get 5% back with their card 

Then again, at least LEGO isn't Toys R Us bad 

[MAB]

I don't know if this is worldwide or just UK. They had the chrome red keychains up for grabs last week. I ordered two vouchers. If you enter the code, it gives an error and stops you checking out. Even though items are in your bag, you cannot see what they are as it keeps coming back with errors. You cannot remove the code either. There is a manual work around, where you log out, put stuff back in your cart, start the checkout then log back in again. But you cannot checkout for the things you have bought with VIP points or it happens again.  What an absolute mess.

[ShaydDeGrai]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

(snip)...  What an absolute mess.

Couldn't agree more, though I think we're actually convolving two separate issues.  First they are trying to implement a new system that, at best, I think we can agree is "less than universally seen" as an improvement.  The second issue is that they are doing it poorly.  Regardless of what I (or others) think of their new VIP system, I appreciate that they are trying to have a fresh and exciting e-commerce site; the problem is (and I say this as an IT professional who, in a previous position spent a decade building Web UI infrastructure) at a coding level, their web site is terrible.

Under the covers, they aren't trying to do anything that couldn't have been done in a fault tolerant, cross-platform way five years ago, but when I visit the site with my development platform and see what's going on under the covers with a debugger, the code looks like it was thrown together by a some high school hacker with no regard for exception handling, dynamic error recovery or the professional discipline one would expect from a company with TLG's resources.  If there's an established, proven standard way of doing X, and a proprietary, bleeding edge alternative, nine times out of ten they opt for the latter.  I know first hand the challenges in getting a web site to look and behave uniformly (or at least predictably) across dozens of versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, IE, Opera, Android, etc. and all the mobile variations thereof, but there's a quarter century of software engineering lessons-learned to help identify good and bad practices, and it seems like they completely ignore it on a regular basis.

The basic lego shop website already had all sorts of rendering issues, untrapped/unrecovered errors and cross browser behavioral issues _before_ attempting a quasi-integration with the VIP subsection so I can't say that I'm in any way surprised that the added (IMHO, unneeded) complexity of the new system has only added to the instability of the shopping experience.

[ I really am turning into a grumpy old man, aren't I?  -sigh- Sorry... ]

[MAB]

Yes, true. There is what they are trying to do and how they are doing it.

I am actually positive about what they are trying to do - give VIPs more choice about rewards. But somewhat negative about how they are doing it - the good stuff goes within a day, typically lasting only hours or sometimes minutes. Plus their programming implementations, of course.

[ShaydDeGrai]

So I get the usual (multiple copies for some reason) LegoShop adverts in my mailbox this morning and dutifully click the latest offers and promotions tag to find, well, not a lot really.  No sets on sale (sure minifigs, pods, and Lego branded miscellaneous stuff, but no real "sets")  No gift with purchase.  Double VIP points on only a couple of sets (one of which I already have, the other I have no plans to acquire) and front  and center, drum roll please...  a chance to enter a sweepstakes to win a pair of sneakers that would never fit me.  (On the flip side, if they did offer sneakers in my size as one of the prize categories, I'd have a good chance of winning, I don't think there are that many AFOL's running around with size 16 (US) feet ).  

This line-up of "incentives" doesn't strike me as a offer or a deal and it certainly doesn't make me feel like a "very important person" in the eyes of TLG.  But, I accept that just because I don't care about the sneakers, I think, maybe there are some redemption rewards worth having.  So, I click through to the rewards center where I find posters, key rings, tickets to parks and discovery centers (the closest of which to me is still closed due to COVID 19 restrictions), and placeholders where some older GWP options have sold out; basically more crap that means nothing to me. 

Then I notice up in the corner my current VIP point balance, more than enough for ten $100 vouchers, but at this point I'm sufficiently turned off by the whole experience that I don't even want to bother redeeming anything if it means jumping through hoops to buy direct from Lego. So I go over to Amazon, shop their sales and deals on LEGO and save over $100 over MSRP and rack up some cash-back rewards points on my credit card instead.

I have to think that when a "buyer loyalty incentives" program drives customers to the competition and makes people less likely to want to do business with them in the future (even when some of those customers have hundreds of dollars in "free" Lego coming to them), their sales and marketing team is doing something wrong. 

I've been a Lego VIP member since the days when they stamped a physical card at the register to record purchases and, frankly, I felt like I was getting a lot more out of the system then than I am now.  Of course, their sales are strong despite the fiasco that is the VIP system so maybe I'm in the minority (or maybe they just don't care).

[MAB]

I don't let mine build up. As soon as I can get a discount voucher I take it.

[daiichigo]

Hi, I'm new here and had trouble understanding anything from the Lego site. 

Can someone please clarify?

I need to spend 2400 VIP points before they expire soon. 

How much money/voucher/discount does that give me on lego.com if I need to spend it on sets sold on the U.S. site?

Thank you for any insights!

[NathanR]

5 hours ago, daiichigo said:

Hi, I'm new here and had trouble understanding anything from the Lego site. 

Can someone please clarify?

I need to spend 2400 VIP points before they expire soon. 

How much money/voucher/discount does that give me on lego.com if I need to spend it on sets sold on the U.S. site?

Thank you for any insights!

If you log in to your Lego account and go to the VIP reward center, you can see what you can get with your points: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/vip/rewards-center/rewards

In UK, 800 points will get you 5 GBP discount, I can't access the US rewards to see what it's worth, but it's probably similar.

There are also various items you can get, ranging from desktop wallpapers to metal keyrings.

[daiichigo]

Just now, NathanR said:

If you log in to your Lego account and go to the VIP reward center, you can see what you can get with your points: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/vip/rewards-center/rewards

In UK, 800 points will get you 5 GBP discount, I can't access the US rewards to see what it's worth, but it's probably similar.

There are also various items you can get, ranging from desktop wallpapers to metal keyrings.

@NathanR Thank you, so doing the math from pounds to dollars it appears that 2400 VIP points would get a $20 discount off a new purchase.

I hope someone familiar with the American site can read this and confirm that understanding or correct it.

  Now my biggest concern is that the set I want to buy is out of stock, I got an email it came in stock and by the time I clicked on the email, it was out of stock.

So I don't want to prematurely "get a voucher" with my VIP points because I might time a 30-day voucher wrong and not get the set in stock.

Or maybe I should just wait to use the voucher on a less expensive Jan 1 release and forget about the big expensive set I was aiming for.

[MAB]

6 hours ago, daiichigo said:

Hi, I'm new here and had trouble understanding anything from the Lego site. 

Can someone please clarify?

I need to spend 2400 VIP points before they expire soon. 

How much money/voucher/discount does that give me on lego.com if I need to spend it on sets sold on the U.S. site?

Thank you for any insights!

Cash them in for a voucher on the last day before they expire. That way, you will get the longest life-time on them.