I’m a massive fan of collecting points, whether they be Qantas Frequent Flyer points, Velocity points, AMEX points, whatever it is. Besides using these points to purchase flights (from which you can save more than 70% off international flights with), another way to spend your points is at the Qantas Rewards Store where you can redeem travel accessories, jewellery, kitchen appliances, electronics to gift cards and more.
Let’s see what’s in the store.
Data was extracted as at 13 February 2022 from the Qantas Rewards Store. This excludes their alcohol division.
I’ve noticed only a couple days later that some pricing of products has changed – goes to show how dynamic their pricing strategy is!
How broad is the store?
The store contains 7,618 products across 516 different brands. That’s more than triple the number of products sold at the Australian Aldi supermarket! Goes to show how large their span of products are.
Seeing what categories these products mostly sit in is quite tricky as products can sit in multiple categories.
For example, the Qantas Narita 3pc Trolley Case Set comes up in both Luggage and Qantas Merchandise.
Using a rough categorisation and showing the top 6 categories which cover 50% of the store, and the remaining 35 categories covers the remaining 50% of the store.
Price distribution of Qantas Store products
Looking at the number of products by the amount of points it costs to purchase it,
This is quite a left skewed distribution but what stands out the most is that there are 600 products that cost more than 100k points which represents about 9% of all products on the store!
My guess on why there are so many big ticket point items, and a chasm of products of products between 50k to 100k points is because there are two types of point collectors:
- Those who collect points via spending (typically 1 point per dollar spent)
- Those who collect points using credit cards (sign on bonuses ranging from 40k to 150k)
There’s got to be the smaller ticket attainable items to provide value to those who collect points via spending, but also the larger ticket items to incentivise those who collect stacks of points to redeem them all at once and reduce the points liability off Qantas Loyalty’s balance sheet.
For some additional info, the average cost of a product was 47,054 points and the median product cost 17,390 points.
Which categories are on sale?
As at 13 February 2022, 15.4% of the store’s products were on sale.
The categories with the largest proportion of products on sale are:
| Category | % of Products on Sale |
| Coffee Machines | 78.5% |
| Kettles and Toasters | 76.8% |
| Headphones | 70.8% |
| Audio and Speakers | 56.4% |
| Blenders and Juicers | 36.8% |
These are huge proportions of the categories on sale! Perhaps Qantas was trying to clear out stock from their warehouses? Or perhaps because people aren’t flying as much (Qantas Group’s total international capacity is at around 20% of pre-COVID levels), and certain people have likely been accumulating massive amounts of points, maybe they’ve identified that these are the categories that these certain people have a greater propensity of purchasing and are trying to incentivise them to use their points to reduce the points liability? This is all just speculation 🙂
Most Expensive Products on Qantas Store
Let’s take a look at the top 3 most expensive products on the Qantas Rewards store.
1. Galaxy Black Outdoor BBQ & Kitchen (1,338,950 points or $7,699)
Extremely pricey. Very premium. I don’t have the points, money nor space for this beast.
2. Beoplay A9 Wifi GVA Speaker (Bronze/Walnut) (1,008,690 points or $5,800)
To be honest the most surprising thing here wasn’t the price, but I didn’t know that speakers could take this shape?!
3. MacBook Pro 16 inch (912,860 points or $5,249)
One of the top specced latest Apple MacBook Pros. Looks like there’s a new sale going on in the store right now as well (since time I obtained the data) and you can grab it for 730,280 points which is a 20% points saving.
Conclusion
The Qantas Store has a huge range of products that rivals even the local Australian supermarkets. It’s range covers mostly travel goods and accessories (obviously) and they’ve got products at various different prices to incentivise redemptions across all levels! The types of products they put on sale *may* indicate their pricing strategy and is interesting to think about.
I had no idea speakers could look like a chair.
Let me know what else you’d like to see.
