When Alisa Mills heard that she was the winner of a use-it-or-lose-it $25,000 online holiday sweepstakes promotion her first reaction was disbelief.
“I was in shock and trying to figure out if this was real or not,” she says from her home in Fredericksburg, VA. “Everybody in my family kept saying, `It’s a hoax.'”
But to Mills’ delight, it was not a hoax. She had been randomly selected by Webcertificate.com as the sole winner of its e-shopping promotion.
The promotion was designed to create buzz and build awareness about the site (www.webcertificate.com), where visitors can – for a service fee – purchase online gift certificates ranging in price from $20 to $200. The certificates can be redeemed at any online store that accepts credit cards, says Paul Raden, co-founder of Conshohocken, PA-based Webcertificate.com.
Mills received a $1,000 Webcertificate each day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. The challenge: to spend $1,000 online every day or forfeit that day’s remaining balance. The certificate was to be used in place of a credit card.
While the task initially appeared daunting to Mills, whose e-shopping experiences had been limited to purchasing books and CDs, she caught on fast. She was soon buying tires for her dad’s truck from an online tire retailer, an electric blanket for her mom from strouds.com, a vacuum cleaner for her aunt, a digital camera for her brother, four TVs, an indoor fountain and lots of clothes.
The 29-year-old computer programmer bought herself a new bedroom set from livingroom. com – which assigned her a personal shopper – and pet food which she donated to the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “It was a total unexpected blessing for me,” she enthuses.
She purchased an average four items a day, coming as close as 7 cents to her spending limit on one occasion.
While holiday online shopping glitches, such as unfulfilled orders and overburdened, inaccessible Web sites were frustrating many consumers during the holiday season, Mills says she encountered few problems.
But Mills did find the Web limiting in some ways. She confesses that on a number of occasions, she went to a local store to “touch and feel and hear” products, such as stereo speakers, before making a purchase online. “There are just certain things you can’t do online,” she points out.
Mills completed a daily journal at Webcertificate.com detailing her shopping purchases and experiences. Space was also given to the public to offer shopping tips.
Webcertificate.com, which launched its site in November 1998, promoted the event last October. The firm gathered more than 100,000 entrants before randomly selecting Mills as the winner.
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