Luxury4Less (sucks that this link can’t be an invite link) is a closed shopping community developed and run by more4bucks Pty Ltd. Members of this exclusive club get the opportunity, by invitation only, to participate in volume and time-limited special shopping campaigns. During these campaigns, selected products of popular and well-known brands are on offer. These products are either not available on the local market, are off-season products or over-stock items and can therefore be offered to members at extremely attractive conditions, up to 70% below recommended retail price!

If you follow my style category, then you’ll know that I love all things fashion and interior design, so to hear about a website like this, locally, is always a good surprise. I quickly headed over to the website and created an account, the sign up was seamless and took all of 20 seconds.

Upon logging in I was presented with a lot of information, and to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure where to click, I sort of thought I would be presented with a list of things they sell and I could just browse them. It didn’t take me too long to see the list of Current Campaigns on the left, which show their current campaigns, the problem with spotting this is that the first link says “Invite your friends and earn!!”, which probably shouldn’t be positioned there as it totally throws you off! I’ve been looking for a second pair of sunglasses recently, so I clicked through to their Oakley campaign and now I was presented with the list of products, which is exactly what I was looking for. Wow, cheap prices – R900 or so for a pair of Oakley’s, that’s basically 50% less than usual! What’s quite clever is that each campaign has a time limit, so these Oakley shades have about 1 day left, and once that’s up, the campaign closes and the next open is opened – nice way to put a little purchase pressure on the visitor – clever :)

I must admit, I clicked through to the next campaign as the bug did bite and now I found an assortment of fragrances, from Lacoste, Hugo Boss and a few others, all retailing for a lot less than they usually cost – I know this because I own a few different bottles myself and I usually pay at least R500 a go and these were all in the R300 range.

I think it’s clever how they’ve built in a bit of a social side to it – by inviting friends to the site, you earn credits, which can then be used to purchase items, and what ties it together, which is the essential part in my opinion is the fact that you can see which of your friends have signed up – That’s crucial for “affiliate” systems in my opinion!

They’ve included the usual social media icons – facebook, twitter, etc. allowing you to share the site with friends – this is a good move, but, I think they should allow visitors to tell a friend about a specific product and allow the visitor to attach their signup code – what this does is allows current users to invite their friends secretly buy sharing a product with an amazing price – That would increase the number of invitations ten fold in my opinion ;)

They offer both EFT and credit card payments, which is nice to know, I’m tired of PayPal always being the only option!

My main concern is the fact that their SEO is going to be a problem – With all the pages hidden behind a login, it’s going to be hard to index products – Analytics offers the ability to track secure pages, but as far as SEO goes, I’m not quite sure that they’ll be able to index with Google/Yahoo!/Bing, etc. which is going to result in a lot less organic traffic. On top of this, the general SEO of the website hasn’t been looked into. I do like the fact that they have an RSS feed for their campaigns, means I can easily see the minute they add new products!

All in all, I think it’s a cool idea and the prices are quite amazing – The first thing I would work on is the trust factor, people are scared to purchase online as is, let alone when their are deals like this.

I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for their specials.