We are exploring an opportunity with Costco for selling gift cards and were wondering if anyone else is also working with them and would be willing to share experiences with us?
Thanks in advance,
Michele
Hey Michele,
We were doing Costco gift certificates here at The 5th for quite some time. We decided to stop doing them this season and have no desire to go back. The administration of the certificates is very time consuming. You will get orders from each Costco individually. If one Costco participates and another doesn't, they get very confused on doing refunds. Any unused certificates have to be "cancelled" in Tessi once they return them to you. They are VERY particular about what the gift certificates are for and for how much.
We were VERY glad to not be selling gift certificates at Costco any longer. We just realized that the ROI just wasn't worth it.
Christopher Cuhel, The 5th Avenue Theatre
Not us, but great idea! I’m assuming you might make 50% or so on them after you have to give a discount and Costco takes their cut? Could introduce you to new audiences as long as you feel they are the right ones for your org.
On a related note, I saw Costco now has a ticketing side of the business – seems like mostly sports and concerts right now. Has anyone done this?
Jen Buzzell
Signature Theatre
SigTheatre.org
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Michele Keutsch Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 11:14 AM To: Jen Buzzell <buzzellj@sigtheatre.org> Subject: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Costco
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We also started looking into this just a month or so ago! After an extensive discussion internally we decided that if we go down this road (still undetermined) the only way we can feasbily do it is with vouchers (printed outside of Tessitura and redeemed as Comps with a specific Comp Reason attached).
Our business setup already caused a hiccup with using gift certificates for this and the more we discussed it the more voucher-like it started to sound to everyone in the room with the kinds of restrictions we wanted to have.
Our marketing team is pushing hard for this (reaching out to potential new customers, getting our brand seen by tons of people walking by, the possibility of people spending more money than just the voucher redemption) but our finance team is less enthused (they don't see the ROI benefits). It also seems like Costco has a lot of specific demands that will even affect how we do our own marketing over the year. Another important thing to keep in mind is any legislation around gift cards in your area. If we went with gift cards then we would have to specify all of the restrictions on the card itself with no expiry date, etc. We will be having another meeting soon to decide if we want to do this for sure or it's not for us right now.