American Express have updated their shop small website, which now displays a promotion for Small Business Saturday (seen below) that will return on November 28th. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise as it’s always the Saturday after thanksgiving.
Unfortunately the site gives no other additional information about how the deal will be structured, last year you got a $10 statement credit for every $10 you spent at a participating local business and you could do that deal three times per American Express card.
The idea behind small business Saturday has always been to increase the number of small businesses that accept American Express cards. Small businesses are usually hesitant to accept these cards because they are charged a higher fee than Visa and Mastercard (and a lesser extent Discover). Obviously if they have a lot of consumers asking if they accept American Express and then not making a purchase if they say no, they’ll be more likely to accept American Express in the future due to fears of losing customers.
It’s also an easy way to reward cardholders as well. It’ll be interesting to see what promotion American Express offer this year, a lot of merchants were unhappy about a lot of low value transactions last year but offering a smaller credit multiple times has a better chance of sharing the love between small businesses in a participating area.
The small businesses that did the best last year, did one of two things: made gift packs/gift certificates that were $10 in value and/or allowed customers to break bigger purchases into multiple transactions.
