Visa’s SavingsEdge is a senseless waste of server space
I paid $96 for another year of WordPress.com Premium last week. It could have been less–perhaps as much as 50 percent less–but managment at a site called Visa SavingsEdge apparently had other ideas.
That site, for those who have been blessed with never having to use it, is a cashback portal run by Visa that lets you sign up for rebates on qualifying business credit cards like my Chase United Club card. It was simple to use–you didn’t need to opt in before a particular purchase–and it saved me a decent amount of money from 2021 through the first half of 2024, all from rebates for bookings at MGM hotels in Las Vegas.
But then Visa decided to fix what was not broken from my perspective. “We’re excited to announce that Visa SavingsEdge will be enhanced to provide even more ways to save on your business purchases,” a Feb. 1, 2024 e-mail informed me.
The new site that debuted last summer still provides automatic rebates on in-store purchases but requires you to click through a “Shop Now” link for online cashbacks–and restricts hotel and car-rental cashbacks to bookings made through that site.
The site itself flunks basic usability guidelines, starting with this idiotic requirement: “For security reasons, passwords must be updated every 90 days.” Password expiration polices were dumb when I wrote a column in the Post criticizing them as a dogmatic relic 20 years ago, Microsoft stopped recommending them six years ago, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s security guidelines now outright ban them.
Clicking the “Log In” button–and then clicking almost any other navigational element, from a section heading to a “Load more” button below a list of offers–subjects you to a brief delay in which the entire page blurs and a white circle in the middle of it pulses, as if the page is trying to show off how hard it’s working.
I’ve clocked this lag at anywhere from one to seven seconds, with two seconds the most common wait. Which is a long time for any site to remind me of waiting for an interlaced image file to download over a dial-up connection. And like enforcing a password-expiration policy in 2025, the only thing this visual effect does is flaunt hostility to the user.
I’ve also come across an extra level of authentication annoyance: Navigating away from the site and trying to log back in can get me an error message nonsensically informing me that “A session is already open. Please try again later.” But since I am not, in fact, logged in, this leaves me locked out.
All of that still seemed like it would be worthwhile when an Aug. 13 e-mail tipped me off to a 50 percent cashback deal on “qualifying purchases” here–just in time for my annual renewal. But every time I have clicked on a link for this WordPress.com offer on the SavingsEdge site, I have been dumped on a page devoid of any details except for two asterisked items covering Visa’s policies for travel cashbacks.
Maybe my low-end WordPress.com plan wouldn’t have qualified anyway–the one other SavingsEdge offer that features a service I already pay for, Google Workspace, is only good for Business Standard plans. But one thing is clear: Thumbwrestling with this insult to Web design has cost me time that I will never get back.
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