What is a mail-in-rebate?
A mail-in-rebate, or MIR, is a marketing tactic manufacturers use to convince customers to purchase their products. Products are often advertised as having unrealistically low prices, for example "Platinum Widgets only $1 Each!*" (note the asterisk) followed by fine print that may say something like "* After $100 mail in rebate". The customer must first buy the product at full price, in my example that would be $100, fill out a form, photocopy their receipt, cut out a UPC from the product box, put everything into an envelope and mail it to a rebate fulfillment center. If the rebate center receives and approves your submission, they may eventually send a check out to you that you may, or may not, receive.
You'll notice I used the word "if" and "may" a few times in that last sentence. I'll explain why in a little bit when I get around to breaking down the process. But first....
Why do companies do mail-in-rebates?
Rebates work as a marketing ploy in the same way coupons in the Sunday paper work. Let's say you see a coupon for $1 off Poop-Away. You've never bought Poop-Away before, but maybe you can find a use for Poop-Away around the house. It may be time to give Poop-Away a try. So you clip the coupon and buy a can of Poop-Away. Then again, you may not fall for this marketing. I know I don't. I only clip coupons of things I already know I'm going to buy. Even then, if I get to the store and find some other brand that will substitute nicely is cheaper, even though I have a coupon for the other brand, I may just decide to crumple up the coupon and just buy the cheaper brand. Unfortunately, that's not the majority of customers. Most people end up spending MORE money at the grocery store when they clip every coupon out of the paper, for the same reason people that don't make shopping lists and then go to the store on an empty stomach spend more money.
If you see a product that's unbelievably cheap, after rebate, manufacturers are counting on you to buy the product whether you need it or not. They hope to increase sales by enticing people with incredibly low, after rebate prices. But it is my opinion that rebates should be treated in the same way coupons are treated. If you don't need the product, you probably shouldn't buy it. If you can't afford the product before rebate DEFINITELY don't buy it. I've seen so many people say "I'm building my computer and it's only going to cost me $500" when the fact of the matter is the computer will cost them $1000 out of pocket to build. Sorry, but it's like the old bird in the hand, three in the bush adage. Until every single rebate check is in your hand, that computer cost you $1000. So if you can't afford a $1000 computer, you need to rethink your purchasing decisions.
How can companies do mail-in-rebates?
Manufacturers count on you to buy a product with a rebate but don't count on you redeeming the rebate. There's a big misconception that when a manufacturer does a rebate that they're either losing money or they're making an assload of money ordinarily. Fact of the matter is, MOST people never send in their rebate. Even when they do send in their rebates, a decent percentage of them send them in too late or did something wrong causing the rebate to get rejected. Typically, even a rebate as high as $50 only has a 50% redemption rate. If that figure is historically true with a particular product, the manufacturer can count on an average discount of $25 per unit sold and NOT the $50 per product discount the consumer assumes there is.
Manufacturers have to be careful to not have too high of a redemption rate. $10, $20, $30 rebates are RARELY redeemed. $100 rebates, on the other hand, get redeemed more often. It's up to the manufacturer to find the balance between having a decent enough rebate to draw people into buying product and not losing money after the promotion is over.
Why do so many people complain about rebate houses not paying?
This happens for the same reason there are more complaints about companies on Reseller Ratings than there are positive reviews. I'm guilty of this too. When We-Be-Gadgets ships me my new pocket theremin undamaged and in a timely manner, odds are I'm not going to post a positive review anywhere. We-Be-Gadgets did what they were supposed to do. Thanks, now quit sending me Spam. But let's assume for a minute I get a dead pocket theremin or the tone of my theremin is not as ethereal as advertised. What do I do? I post a negative review of either my pocket theremin and/or complain about We-Be-Gadgets selling second rate products! The same is true about rebate houses. If I send in my rebate and in one to two months time get my check, I cash my check and go on with life. If I never get my check, you better believe I'm going to bitch about not receiving my check to anyone willing to listen!
Now, I'm not siding with big corporate America taking away your hard earned money but about a year ago I had worked for Ultra Products and maintained the customer support forums. Ultra, being a division of Systemax, had to use the "dreaded" OnRebate, another Systemax company, to process their rebates. A good deal of the posts in the forum ended up being people complaining about not getting paid for their rebates. Naturally, I would try to help these people get their rebates, but while doing this I would find that these people, despite being a large percentage of the membership base at Ultra's support forums, were in fact a very, very, very small percentage of the people that actually filed for and received their rebates.
Quite a few of these people, yet not the majority, were denied their rebates because they weren't paying attention to what needed to be included with the rebate. I've had to deal with customers that:
1. Sent in the wrong bar code. They would cut out a bar code sticker applied by the distributor or reseller as opposed to the one actually printed on the retail box itself. When in doubt, contact the manufacturer or rebate fulfillment company. DO NOT take the word of someone working at the reseller on what will work as a valid UPC for your rebate. I can't even begin to tell you how many excuses I've heard that started with "But the guy at the checkout told me....."
2. Sent in a packing slip as opposed to an invoice. Some rebates will take one or the other, while most require only an invoice. Many products are drop shipped from the manufacturer so the packing slips included with the product do not include a purchase price. These packing slips are often NOT taken as proof of purchase. When in doubt, contact the manufacturer or rebate fulfillment company. DO NOT take the word of someone working at the reseller on what will work as a valid invoice for your rebate. I can't even begin to tell you how many excuses I've heard that started with "The guy on the phone told me that......"
3. Had different addresses on the invoice and rebate form. These have to match. If they don't, you don't get your check. DO NOT take the word of someone working at the reseller that the address on the receipt doesn't matter when you tell them to put a change of address in the computer. I can't even begin to tell you how many excuses I've heard that started with "When I told the guy at the register to put in my new address he told me it wouldn't matter......"
4. Forgot to sign the rebate form. Yes, the rebate form is a contract. By signing the rebate form you're agreeing to the terms of the contract. If you don't sign it, it's not getting processed.
How do I make sure my rebate is received, accepted and paid?
1. Make sure you include EVERYTHING that the rebate asks for. If they ask for an invoice, send an invoice and NOT a packing slip. If they ask for the original UPC, send the original UPC and NOT a copy. If you're in doubt about ANYTHING contact the manufacturer or the rebate processing center and NOT the reseller you bought the product from.
2. Make sure you sign your rebate if they ask you to sign it. Don't like signing your name to an agreement even if it means you getting your money or not? Then you must not want your money bad enough. And you WILL likely get added to a Spam list. That's one of the perks of running a rebate fulfillment center. You get to gather the personal information of people from a fairly well defined demographic and can be sold (like someone that sends in a MIR for a carton of cigarettes probably smokes, so it might make sense to sell their information to a company that makes smoking jackets. No? Who still wears a smoking jacket other than Hugh Hefner?)
3. Make copies of EVERYTHING and keep these copies until the rebate check is in your hand.
4. Some rebates submissions simply never make it to the processing center. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that EVERYTHING you've ever mailed was received by the intended recipient? Of course not! Because you're reading this on the Internet and don't see my eye. But that's beside the point. Fact is, not every rebate submission makes it to the fulfillment center and not every rebate check makes it to the customer. If the rebate is for a good chunk of change (I would say $50 or better) I would invest a couple bucks in getting signature confirmation (NOT delivery confirmation) or use a carrier like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. where you can actually track the rebate from your house to the rebate center. Even if the rebate center is guilty of throwing half of the submissions away so they can say "We didn't receive the rebate", you have NO PROOF just because you put a stamp on an envelope and stuck it in the mailbox. Delivery confirmation is worthless because if a business receives a large quantity of parcels and letters (like a rebate house), the post office that services that business will scan all delivery confirmation stickers prior to delivery so the mail carrier doesn't have to stand around at the business scanning a plethora of bar codes. When I worked RMA for TCWO, this would happen a lot. People would check the USPS website for the status of their delivery confirmation and find that their RMA was delivered at 5 o'clock in the morning. They would then call me to find out the status of their RMA when I hadn't even received it yet. At 5 o'clock, I was NOT at TCWO. In fact, nobody was. 5 o'clock was the time the truck arrived at the post office and dropped off our packages, not when they were dropped off at TCWO.
5. BE PATIENT! You shouldn't go bitching about not getting your rebate only four weeks after you mailed it in. Fact of the matter is, it takes A LONG time to process a rebate. Rebates are opened in batches and processed in batches. This is because rebate processing centers process rebates for multiple manufacturers simultaneously. It would be very inefficient for them to do one rebate for Company A, then another for Company B, then Company C, then a second for Company A. They group as many from one company as possible and process them together. They then take the lump sum that the manufacturer owes the rebate processing center for all the checks that need to go out and put it in an invoice for the manufacturer to pay so the rebate house can then in turn send out checks to the customers. If it takes the rebate processing center 4 weeks to process 100,000 rebates and your rebate comes in on week 5, you may have to wait until another 100,000 rebates to come in before yours gets processed. And if more rebates come in than the manufacturer anticipated and they go "over budget", they may without paying some of the rebates until another month goes by and they can take it out of another month's budget.
What's mail-in-rebate's future?
I think it's safe to say "not good". More and more retailers are refusing to do rebates. And more and more customers are starting to look at the "hard price" first. Like I said, MOST people get their rebate checks in the mail. I personally have received every one I've ever mailed in. Is it worth the time and effort? Depends. $220 off the price of a Blackberry I was going to buy anyways? Yes. $100 off an Asus Eee PC I was going to buy anyways? Yes. MIR that gets me a free cable modem with a one year commitment to Comcast when I need to get broadband anyways? Yes. But I'm not buying a motherboard I don't need just because it'll only be $50 after I get my rebate check. And, despite all of the Mountain Dew I drink, I'm not going out of my way to mail in a $2 rebate for a 12 pack of cans. Just remember what you've read here: Buy wisely by buying only buying what you need and what you can afford, make sure you complete everything you need to complete to get your rebate, sign it and use a delivery method that allows you to prove that it was delivered to send in your rebate.
Good luck!