Is this truely what i am seeing? I have to spend at least $3.50 to get a "free" item?

Yes, that's what the grab bag is! A sales promotion!

You may spend $3.50 as many times as you like and get a free grab bag item each time, as long as you also add the Grab Bag product in your cart.

Offer expires on Monday, at noon - server time! :)

Rena

Grab bags have honestly become one of my least favorite promotions. There are a number of problems with them, particularly over time.

1. I generally buy multiple items at one time. During grab bags you have to break them up into single purchases which makes order history a bear, and you have to go through the check out process for each item, adding in the grab bag item. Frankly that's a huge waste of time. I just don't bother.
2. A lot of the items are things like textures, which will just sit around taking space because you never bought the base item, and are never going to. Actually of the selection of grab bag items, I usually have most of them, and there are reasons I didn't buy the others. Like I couldn't see a use for them. (Not that there is anything wrong with them, I just didn't need them)
3. Happily this has now been fixed, but they used to have to pull the check for already bought items off during grab bags, which made the site very difficult to use except for new items.

Anyway, I've made a couple of purchases this week while the grab bags were on, and didn't bother adding grab bag item to the cart let alone break up the purchase to maximize it. It just does not spur a buying impulse from me at this point.

diogenese19348 posted at 12:58PM Thu, 31 May 2018 - #4329999

Grab bags have honestly become one of my least favorite promotions. There are a number of problems with them, particularly over time.

1. I generally buy multiple items at one time. During grab bags you have to break them up into single purchases which makes order history a bear, and you have to go through the check out process for each item, adding in the grab bag item. Frankly that's a huge waste of time. I just don't bother.
2. A lot of the items are things like textures, which will just sit around taking space because you never bought the base item, and are never going to. Actually of the selection of grab bag items, I usually have most of them, and there are reasons I didn't buy the others. Like I couldn't see a use for them. (Not that there is anything wrong with them, I just didn't need them)
3. Happily this has now been fixed, but they used to have to pull the check for already bought items off during grab bags, which made the site very difficult to use except for new items.

Anyway, I've made a couple of purchases this week while the grab bags were on, and didn't bother adding grab bag item to the cart let alone break up the purchase to maximize it. It just does not spur a buying impulse from me at this point.

1 - Let's face it: the entire cart process here at Rendo is agonizingly complex and slow period. To be honest, it's one of the least customer friendly systems I've ever come up with, and that extends not just to the actual process of checking out, with the slow processing and pointless added step of confirming the shipping address on a store that sells 99.9999% digital only products, but also in adding or removing items from the cart. So yeah, breaking it into single item purchases makes it even more frustrating, and with the dance to have to go back, add the Grab Bag icon for every order and then rekey all the CC or GC data only makes it worse. The only help I can offer is my cheat of keeping all the data on keeping the Gravb Bag link open in a second tab and all the stuff you have to manually type on an open text document that you can cut and paste from, but even that still takes way too long when you consider that everything can be done on a single page at the DAZ store.

2 - There used to be a lot of textures but I only got a few this time and I did around 30 grab bags transactions. You shouldn't be getting many items that you already have, and when you do the Store Staff have been really good about allowing for an exchange if you can document it... that kind of hoses you with items received as BOGOS, but in the Poser sale at the beginning of the month I got one item that had previously been a Renderosity freebie and another that was an item that was included in a larger product I'd bought from the same vendor and Renderosity let me get new grab bag items for those. The except there was that I got a bunch of Poser versions of DAZ specific products and vice versa, but I couldn't really complain there since they ARE considered separate items in the store.

I ended up participating in the DAZ round 2 one. There were a number of items on sale at 50% off so I said "why not?" To avoid all the check out problems (I use Paypal) I bought a $100 gift certificate and made around 11 separate purchases. On the grab bag side I got one item I was considering buying, two more that were useful but I probably wouldn't have bought, and the rest were along the lines of "do I really want to spend the time and disk space to install these?" The items weren't bad mind you, but the chances of me ever rendering a homecoming queen scene with a Tiara, or use an M3 clown these days are really remote. Did the grab bag promotion spur me to buy more items? No. Which was sort of my point. The 50% and 60% off of items I could use was what got me to buy, not the grab bag promotion.

A 5% off gift certificate promotion would spur me to buy too (hint, hint) :P

I have long recognized that no one here has the slightest idea about successful marketing since they consistently do stupid things that drive people away. People who understand this stuff turn their bitterest enemies into their most ardent supporters by engaging them and being honest. Here, they just ban you, turning people into disgruntled ex-customers who go elsewhere.