Shell Mastercard: Good Deal, Bad Company
Written: Jun 27 '02 (Updated Jun 28 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Customer Service: |
 |
|
| Web Site Experience: |
 |
|
|
Pros: It's a good deal for reward card. Customer service is excellent. Security is excellent.
Cons: Website needs to be redesigned. The phone system too.
The Bottom Line: If you commute a lot and can get good deals on Shell gas, go for it. However, Chase performs poorly in the information age.
|
|
|
| kjell1979's Full Review: Shell MasterCard (Chase Manhattan) |
My Situation
I was one of the few lucky ones. When I graduated college a year ago I had no student loans and a well paying programming job lined up. My only problem, it was 55 miles away from where I was living. I wanted to live with my fiancee at the time (now my wife), but it meant that I was going to get killed on gas prices. My dad taught accounting at Wharton business school and one of his lessons to me was to always pay off your credit card balance each month if you can. If I can guarantee that the card can be paid off at the end of the month, then go with a rewards card. He had a Exxon Mastercard that gave him 3% off all his Exxon gas purchases and another 1% off any other purchase that would go towards Exxon gas. Given my situation, a card like this would be the way to go.
Enter Shell Platinum Mastercard
After getting rejected by Exxon due to my lack of credit, the next day I received a preapproval for a Shell Platinum Mastercard. These were the details:
* 5% off Shell Gas Purchases
* 1% off all other purchases that go towards Shell Gas at the end of the month
* $5000 credit line!
I didn't pay attention to the APR rates because I knew they were probably bad since it was a rewards card. My wife and I have a Capital One card that has a low APR just in case we need to carry a balance.
I signed up for it and quickly my Discover Card began to collect dust.
The Good
It's a Mastercard, so you can use it just about anywhere. The only place where I couldn't use it was at Sam's Club. However, I can use my Discover Card there and get a 1% rebate on your purchase. (*NOTE* Discover now only pays 0.1% on Sam's Club purchases, effective around April 1, 2002. -- thanks to Arthur.Rubin for that tip)
For someone like me, this card is well worth it. I was really saving a lot of money a month. The statements were well formatted, although the font for the purchase lines was small. Like all the other credit cards I have, they give you a reasonable time to pay off the balance.
Customer service was excellent. I found them very friendly and very flexible in my opinion. Customer Service gets your problems resolved fast without making it seem as if they want to shuffle you on your way to improve their performance times. If I have a quick question, it usually gets resolved in under a minute as soon as I get on the phone with a representative. Never have I had to ask to speak with the manager.
Finally, Chase seems to do more security checks than other companies. I see this as a plus, although others may not. Let me fill you in on the details. Over the phone, when you want to do something like request a new PIN number, or change your mailing address for your bill, you are typically asked a security question like "what's your mother's maiden name", "what's your Social Security Number" or something like that. I'm always going to know that information and if it adds an additional minute to my call, then that's good. I'd rather have that extra minute than have one person slip through the system and commit fraud on my card because they weren't asked that question. I noticed the extra security Chase does especially when I call up Discover to make a similar request.
The Bad
Chase hasn't quite embraced the information age as well as other companies have. Their website and automated services have serious technical flaws that would scare away someone who isn't patient nor who is web savvy.
Their Website is by far the worst. I initially noticed that the site is slow and has a lot of broken links. It has a login account system (similar to epinions) that brags about their security. I'm a little skeptical because of the site's overall impression, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for this one. Navigating the site is counter-intuitive. It took me a long time to familiarize myself with how to get certain information. The site does offer ways of downloading your account information into Microsoft Money, Quicken, and even into a spreadsheet format (it could be just for Microsoft Excel, but I don't have any other program to test it out with). Also you can see any of your transactions by specifying any to dates as a range of time. These features are great, if the site is even up. Finally, that last annoying aspect of this website is how to pay your bill online. You have to setup a different user account just to do this. Secondly, it is not obvious what to do once you set this up, and the help directions were really bad. All I wanted to do was to pay my Shell credit card bill straight from my checking account. In order to do this you have to select from a huge list of billing offices from all sorts of companies (*On a side note* This is a really robust system that allows you to pay some of your bills using your credit card or Chase bank account). I selected the Chase category since that's where it was going. All you were given were addresses, none of which matched the address where I send my credit card bill. I had to call customer service and they got me all setup for this, however the address that the customer service rep had me choose was one that I would have never known to pick. Once you setup your account, it's pretty smooth, although you have to go through two different logins to get there, which seems to me counter productive.
The other problem I have is with their automated phone service. The automated phone service attempts to make it fast to dial into your account information when calling from home or work. However, if the automated service isn't able to recognize your phone number, it takes an unnecessarily long time to access your account.
When you call up your initially asked to enter the last 4 digits of your card number. I enter these in and the automated message claims that they didn't recognize the information (suggesting that you entered it in wrong, when I can tell from my phone that I did type it in correctly). Anyway, next it asked you to do the same thing again. This time the message says that they can't match my account number with the phone number I'm calling from. Then it asks me to type the full 16-digit account number. If I'm able to get through all this without any mistakes, then I'm in. However, this is unnecessary. I can understand if they can't recognize my phone numbers, however they should try and match the phone number with any other phone number of an existing account. If it doesn't match, just ask them the 16-digit number from the beginning. This was a big time-waster in my opinion.
Overall
Don't get me wrong this is a good card. If you like good website support, look somewhere else first. But if you fit my description, consider getting this card. It may end up being the only card you'll use too.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
kjell1979
|
 in Games |
 - Top 500 |
|
Location: Oxford, Mass
Reviews written: 276
Trusted by: 346 members
About Me:
Lots of reviews coming in October!
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.