Credit card: don't bother (Egg Card)

Member Name: richard.stamp

Product:	Egg Card
Date:	30/01/02 (411 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The card looks really cool!

Disadvantages: Poor benefits, Inconvenient, Badly-designed website

The sad truth is, running your credit card online is more inconvenient than doing it by post: you have to go through a tedious login process to view your statement, put up with the inevitable website delays and, of course, do the form-filling for the switch in the first place. Should you bother?

Let me say at the outset that, like many people, I pay off my credit card bill every month. I don't know anything about Egg's APR or credit terms.

Considering that Egg is a company that lives or dies by its website, it has some curious user interface problems. The strangest of these is that your monthly credit card statement only displays six transactions or so, unless you choose the "printer-friendly" option. Why's that, then? And why, when you get an email saying you should view your credit card statement, and you log in, and you click on "credit card", does it not show you the aforementioned statement? (You have to use the tiny "view statement" link hidden among a collection on the left-hand side.)

Egg's website is, to be fair, reliable - it's always been up when I've tried it. On the other hand, it's a bit too slow. They also stuff their pages with adverts for their own products, which slows access further and gets deeply irritating after a while.

Now all this was forgivable, for the following reason: Egg offered 1% cashback on all purchases, and 2% at a good range of online retailers. Unfortunately, Egg cut that rate to 0.5% for everything in October. That's nothing special now: loads of companies offer 0.5% cashback with normal paper statements, and a few still offer 1%. (I was also unimpressed, I have to say, that I heard about the cutback through the media rather than Egg.)

With that key advantage gone, Egg's card has few benefits to recommend it. There's no free insurance (though you do, of course, get your statutory protection, for example
if a retailer goes bust). There's a rewards scheme which is even less worthwhile than Barclaycard's - something I never considered possible. And you qualify for rewards just by being an Egg customer, so there's no extra reward for being a frequent user.

And there's simply no benefit to running your account online. Credit cards aren't like bank accounts where you sometimes want to pop in and do a simple transaction. The only thing you need to do on your credit card is view the statement, and it's altogether more convenient to get that by post. (You can't export Egg's statements to Microsoft Money or similar.)

To summarise: if you pay your bill in full each month, Egg offers a less convenient service than conventional providers and - since they slashed their cashback - no benefits in compensation. So why bother? Switch to a conventional card with good cashback or benefits, and leave this part of the Internet revolution behind.

Summary: