Is the iMint loyalty card worth it?

A couple of years ago I got a free iMint card because of my ICICI Bank debit card. I never bothered with it apart from getting mildly irritated with iMint spam in my inbox every week. Last week I got yet another iMint spam - "Redeem your i-mint points & get 100 BONUS i-mint points" - and I wondered, how desparate could they get!

I decided to dig deeper.


Here's what I could fathom from the relevant sections on their website (earning points & redeeming points):

Broadly, you earn 1 point for every Rs 100¹. An additional 1 point if you pay through our ICICI Bank credit/debit card. So, in the most commonly occuring best-case scenario that's about 2 points for every Rs 100. On the redemption side, 4 points equals Re 1²

This means that for every Rs 100 you spend, you earn 50 paise. Which means the merchant is giving you an effective benefit of 0.5% on your purchase. Putting that number in perspective:

• On a flight ticket of Rs 4,000 it's equivalent to getting a Rs 20 discount
• It's like spending about Rs 40,000 in a music store to get a Rs 200 movie ticket free
• Or, like buying apparel worth Rs 60,000 to get a t-shirt worth Rs 300 free

Shocking, isn't it? Is that the value of customer loyalty? 50 paise for every Rs 100 spent? What is this card solving for the merchants or their customers? Am I missing something here?

[1] There are merchants which give you 5 or 10 points for every Rs 100, but neither are those merchants where your transaction frequency is likely to be high, nor are the points high enough to rake-up a decent total on infrequent purchases.
[2] The point-to-rupee ratio on the redemption side is very clear from the way their shopping voucher redemption is  structured. I checked the checkout process on Zoomin and an order worth Rs 292 could be bought for 1167 iMint points. I also looked up the retail price for some of the other stuff that you can redeem on the iMint website and the ratio is pretty much constant.