Frequently Asked Questions
(Helper Perspective)

• What benefits does Rbate offer organizations that provide purchasing help?
• Am I eligible to apply to be a Rbate Helper?
• What are the advantages of listing my work in the purchasing help search engine?
• What are the advantages of using product maker bonuses to fund my enterprise?
• How does Rbate help preserve the integrity and reputation of my organization?
• How can I determine whether a bonus offer is worth pursuing?
• How can I be alerted to new products and bonuses in our field of work?
• How do I get paid for my work?
• What control do I have over the operation of Maker bonuses, and how are these choices made public?
• How do consumers remember who helped them?
• What is an Rcode?
• What is an Rmark?
• What are the consequences of being cited by a consumer during a rebate claim?
• What is the "contributor" system?
• How can I use Rbate to request review samples from product makers?
• How can prevent Rbate from indexing my site's content?

• What benefits does Rbate offer organizations that provide purchasing help?

  If you are an organization that helps consumers make purchasing decisions, Rbate allows you to

  1. Expose your work in a search engine dedicated to such help,

  2. Receive intelligence on how helpful each piece of your work has been to consumers,

  3. Browse and search suggestions that consumers have submitted for particular product-related media and services,

  4. Publish Rcodes, and add Rmark buttons to your webpages, allowing consumers to easily add your material and services to their Rbate Rmark databases, which contain their accumulated product research and preferred purchasing help services, and

  5. To optionally receive a payment when a purchaser is helped, reducing your reliance on advertising and direct or affiliate sales.

  Your organization may provide consumers with product information, evaluations, or recommendations (in the form of media or a service), product demonstration or product trial services (whether or not the products in question are being sold), or a complete purchasing service.

  A full description of how Rbate works can be found here.

• Am I eligible to apply to be a Rbate Helper?

  Helping people choose the best product for their needs is a difficult job to do well, requiring the skill and the burden of the expert, the journalist, the whistleblower, and the consultant. An Rbate Helper that receives product-maker-funded bonuses after certain purchases have been made by those they help has the additional burden of ensuring that the anticipation of such payments does not corrupt the work they do.

  Makers also have a right to expect that the bonuses they pay will lead to a greater interest in Helpers working with (though not necessarily recommending) their products, and also to overall improvements in the choice-assisting services available to the public in categories associated with the categories of products they make.

  For these reasons Rbate only approves applications from Helpers that can satisfy Rbate they are professionally run and publicly offered.

  Applications from individuals who only engage in self-help, or who only provide purchasing advice to friends, will not be approved. If you are such a person you may still be able to participate in Rbate by joining an aggregator of consumer-written reviews, or by joining or forming a professionally-managed reviewer, recommender, or demonstrator cooperative.

  Stores are eligible if advice, demonstrations, or product trials are a significant part of your service.

  If you wish to apply to become a Rbate Helper, and believe your organization fulfils these criteria, please apply here.

  If you do not wish to register with Rbate, or are not eligible to become a Rbate Helper, you can still put Rmark buttons on your webpages, allowing holders of Rbate consumer accounts to Rmark your site, perhaps gaining you a listing in Rbate's purchasing help search engine.

• What are the advantages of listing my work in the purchasing help search engine?

  While consumers sometimes browse review material, and make use of demonstration services while browsing store displays, consumers more often seek help as part of directed research. So while there is an audience for material released to a publishing or broadcasting schedule, and services can be used on an ad-hoc basis, a greater audience is supplied by search.

  However vendor search tools like the Yellow Pages mix helpers (publishers, full-service retailers, and consultants) with no-service vendors and product makers. General search engines do the same.

  Rbate's purchasing help search engine only returns sources of purchasing help. A consumer can specify the exact types of help they're looking for, and can easily narrow their search by product category and location, allowing them to prefer help that is either located nearby or deals with products that are locally available.

  It is free to list your entities in the search index, which also gives you access to the Rmark system, the credit system, and the bonus system.

• What are the advantages of using product maker bonuses to fund my enterprise?
  How does Rbate help preserve the integrity and reputation of my organization?

  Summary: Maker bonuses are a more practical means of funding your work than user fees, and are associated with a lower conflict of interest, better disclosure, a more reliable income stream, and a better user experience than either advertising or direct or affiliate sales. A detailed discussion follows.

  To provide a high-quality service you need a source of revenue, but subscription revenue is hard, and is becoming harder, to come by. This is particularly true for choice-assisting services, which always cover a limited range of products, meaning that a given consumer will only want to refer to that material, or use that service, intermittently.

  Advertising is the most common revenue alternative, but that is becoming less reliable as busy and bombarded consumers increasingly ignore ads, or use technologies such as digital video recorders and on-line blockers to actively bypass ads. As a result you don't and won't get paid for a growing proportion of the information you provide. You also miss out on a lot of affiliate sales revenue when consumers don't purchase via your affiliate links after using your website.

  The general move of just about everything to an ad-funded model has spread the limited pool of advertising dollars more thinly. To boost advertising revenue you may have had to make advertising more distracting than you would have liked, perhaps also by overusing pagination, or have had to risk the independence of your service by accepting advertising directly from product makers.

  Rbate's model of payment via maker-funder bonuses directly connects your income to the quality of your work, as measured by consumer feedback during their rebate claim process.

  Fee recovery through supplier-funded bonuses is already a well established funding model for mortgage, insurance, and investment brokers. However Rbate improves on this by (1), allowing a consumer to be assisted by multiple information brokers (choice agents) on a given purchase, (2), eliminating the need for direct contact between product suppliers and the organizations that evaluate their products, (3), allowing the choice agent to choose what information they wish to know about the bonuses on offer, whether they wish to be paid for their work, and if so, in what way, and (4), publicly exposing these choices and an optional editorial policy statement. The choice agent states clearly how they operate, avoiding innuendo, and the consumer can judge the faith they wish to place in the material and services on offer.

  In many product categories Rbate bonuses will be offered for many alternative products. So even if, say, you gave a particular product that attracts a Rbate helper bonus a negative review, you would still receive a bonus for the help you provided to a consumer if, based on your advice, they ultimately purchased either an alternative product or an alternative type of product that also attracted a Rbate bonus. In this respect Rbate bonuses are no different to revenue gained through affiliate links, assuming the affiliate relationships are clearly disclosed, and are available for a wide range of products. (But so many affiliate links make your site unsightly.)

  You would also receive a bonus following a negative review of a product if a consumer, after proceeding to purchase that product, cited your review, and possibly others, as helpful in assessing the pros and cons of the alternatives.

  An advantage of payment by bonus is that it separates the provision of consumer purchasing assistance from the selling process. Compared to a normal store, a service dedicated to and funded by consumer help can provide advice on a wider range of products, put more effort into services such as product demonstrations, and provide the consumer with a low-pressure experience, being unconcerned if the consumer eventually purchases from a low-price no-service vendor.

  Bonuses also provide the income base to allow evaluation products to be purchased, avoiding (possibly specially-selected) manufacturer samples.

  You can initially use bonus income merely to supplement your current advertising and affiliate income, only scaling back your advertising and link displays if the income they generate no longer compensates for the reductions in goodwill and user experience they bring.

• How can I determine whether a bonus offer is worth pursuing?

  The bonus offers you can view via your Rbate Helper account are firm, with a known expiry date, before which the product maker cannot reduce the bonus amount. In addition, Rbate mandates a minimum per-claim bonus in each category of product, preventing very small bonus offers from cluttering offer lists.

  The Offers Page also displays data on the number of bonuses available (either per product/offer or per product category, depending on your visibility settings), the number that have already been paid, and how reliably each maker converts claim codes into claims and bonus payments. This allows you to evaluate whether it's worth pursuing a bonus by maintaining or increasing your coverage of the product or product categories in question.

• How can I be alerted to new products and bonuses in our field of work?

  You can choose to be emailed when bonuses are added or changed in your area of interest by checking the "Notify me of new bonus offers" box on your Profile Page.

  Use the notification button after performing a search on Rbate's product search engine to keep up-to-date on particular types of new products.

• How do I get paid for my work?

  If you are a registered Rbate Helper, and have chosen on your Rbate account profile to receive bonus payments, then when a consumer makes a post-purchase rebate claim that cites one of your works or services (which Rbate calls Help Entities) as being either helpful or very helpful in determining that purchase, a proportion of the US Dollar helper bonus offered for such help by the maker of the purchased product is credited to your Rbate account. This proportion is dependent on the level of help the consumer has nominated for your entity (very helpful or helpful), the number of other entities cited, and the number of external contributors associated with your entity.

  Rbate pays your earnings monthly, once they exceed $20 USD. Payment is only available by electronic transfer, and only to one of the following account types: U.S. bank account, Australian bank account, Moneybookers, or Paypal.

  When funds of one currency are withdrawn to a payment account that works in a different currency, Rbate performs the currency conversion using the daily reference rates of the European Central Bank, plus a 1.75% risk spread.

• What control do I have over the operation of Maker bonuses, and how are these choices made public?

  Use your account Profile Page to control what you wish to know about Maker bonuses on offer. You can hide them completely, only see a list of product categories in which bonuses are offered, see a list of products offering bonuses, but with hidden bonus amounts, or see individual bonuses and their levels. Choose whatever option is compatible with your organization's policies.

  You can also control how the bonuses you earn are paid. You can opt not to receive any bonus payments, which does not prevent you from receiving credit points and listings in Rbate's purchasing help search engine. Otherwise, you can choose to be paid either the full bonus on offer or the lowest bonus offered over all products in the same market (the combination of product category and product availability region), with a hard lower limit of the minimum permissible bonus that Rbate has set for each category of product. Choose the minimum bonus payment option if you feel that knowledge of the variations in bonuses between products, and payment of these different amounts following claims on different products, could distort, or give the impression of distorting, the work you do.

  Whether you choose to receive the full bonus or a uniform minimum bonus in a given product market, you are permitted to do what some mortgage, investment, and insurance brokers do and opt to only cover or stock those products that offer a bonus that will be not less than a given amount over a sufficiently long period. This is usually only advisable if several products are simultaneously offering bonuses in that market. If you do limit your work in this way you must indicate this fact in your editorial policy statement (see below). Such disclosure is not compulsory if higher bonus offers are simply used to direct more resources to different products, improving training, analysis, or presentation, as long as bonus levels do not affect the results, conclusions, and recommendations you offer.

  Both your bonus visibility and bonus payments choices are displayed to users of Rbate's purchasing help search engine when they click on the "Policies" link that accompanies each of your entities returned as search results. Such a link is also displayed on consumer Rmarks.

  You can choose to append an editorial policy statement to the policy information that consumers see. This can explain your bonus visibility and bonus payment choices, as well as other company policies that relate to bonus and editorial decisions. So just as the absence of any need to deal directly with makers protects you independence, your editorial policy statement allows you to proclaim it.

  You can add and edit your policy statement via your Profile Page.

• How do consumers remember who helped them?
  What is an Rcode?
  What is an Rmark?

  When consumers make a post-purchase cash rebate claim they are asked to cite the Help Entities that helped them come to that purchasing decision, either by entering that entity's unique Rcode, or by selecting that entity from a list of their Rmarks (that subset relevant to the claim product).

  If your entity is not Web-based, you can either provide consumers who use your entity with that entity's Rcode, which Rbate assigns when an entity is created, or you can ask consumers for their email address, which you enter on the Add Rmarks page of your account, automatically giving the consumer an Rmark to your entity. Alternatively, you can refer the entity's users to an associated webpage on which an Rmark button (see below) for the entity appears.

  An entity's Rcode can be displayed on articles, magazines, invoices, business cards, video presentations, emails, or SMSs, or stated in phone conversations or radio broadcasts. To make Rcode display easy, Rbate provides you with a high-resolution Rcode stamp for each of your entities, which look like . You should ask your users to either retain your entity, retain the Rcode stamp, write down the Rcode, or add the Rcode to their Rmarks, so that they have it on hand when they make their post-purchase claim. However once a registered Rbate Consumer has manually entered an Rcode during a claim, it is automatically added to their Rmarks, and so can be re-used on subsequent claims without the consumer having to find and re-enter it.

  The Rcode of a Web-based entity is instead stored in an button that you should place on each of your entity's Web pages using the HTML code Rbate makes available for each entity. Consumers who do not wish to register for an Rbate Consumer account can still retrieve the Rcode by hovering their mouse over this button. But if the button is clicked, your entity is added to the user's Rmarks (after first offering those not yet registered with Rbate to register for either an email- or browser-based Rbate consumer account).

  If a registered Rbate Consumer has set the auto-Rmark option in their account, your entities will be instead automatically added to that visitor's Rmarks when they browse your site, meaning that the entity will automatically appear as a citation option when the person later submits a claim for a related product.

  In this way Rmarks make it easy for consumers to both cite your work during a claim, and to include your entities in their Rmark database of product research, possibly accompanied by notes and a 1-5 rating.

  If you are not a registered Rbate Helper, you can still add the Rmark button to your entities. However Rmarks will be added by URL rather than Rcode, and many of your entity's details will not be automatically filled. As well, when the Rmark button is clicked on a non-registered (Rcode-less) Help Entity, a new window is opened to the Rbate Add Rmark page. In contrast, Rmarking of registered entities by Rbate-registered consumers occurs without leaving your page.

• What are the consequences of being cited by a consumer during a rebate claim?

  Whether or not you choose to get paid for the help you provide to consumers, claim citations add to your entities' claim credit numbers. An entity's credit number has a large influence on the order in which results are returned on searches made on Rbate's purchasing help search engine.

  The credit rankings of each of your entities, relative to others in its product category, and to all other Rbate Help Entities, are displayed as percentage point values in the entity's data row on the Entities Page of your account. You can use this to evaluate the relative effectiveness of each of your entities.

• What is the "contributor" system?

  In order to properly reward all work that contributes to a source of purchasing help, and to encourage collaboration, it is possible to attribute some of an entity's bonus earnings and claim credit to other entities in the Rbate system.

  These other entities may be your own, allowing you to attribute both articles to their authors and new work to earlier work. This makes it easier to assess the relative contribution (and absolute Rbate earnings) of each of your works and employees. Note that credit fractions assigned under an authorship relationship do not draw down the credit and earnings shown for the source entity, while fractions assigned to other works is reapportioned. Contribution chains several levels deep are possible, and will be properly considered when credit and bonus payments are being divided.

  You may also assign fractions of an entity's credit and earnings to external entities that belong to other Helpers by entering the contributing entity's Rcode in the Contributors field of your entity's form. Do this if your entity is based in part on this other entity. For example, if you are creating a review which is a digest of other reviews.

  If an external entity adds one of your entities as a contributor, that entity will appear in the Contributes To column of your entity's row in the entities table on your Entities Page. Use this to verify that the other Helper is abiding by any contribution deal that has been arranged.

  One place to look for such opportunities is through searches made on Rbate's purchasing help search engine. If you see another entity that you would like to draw on for your own work, or if you think that the creator of an entity could make use of your work, then look for a Licensing Enquiries link in that search result that allows you to forward an email to the licensing manager of the content in question. Set your own licensing enquiries email address on your Profile Page.

• How can I use Rbate to request review samples from product makers?

  If you wish to obtain a review sample of a product that is returned by a search on Rbate's product search engine, look for the Request Info/Sample link in the right-hand-side bar. If present, click this to email your sample enquiry to the product's maker.

• How can prevent Rbate from indexing my site's content?

  So that brief excerpts can be shown in search results, Rbate may attempt to spider and index webpages of registered entities, as well as webpages which consumers have placed in their Rmarks. If you wish use a robots.txt file or robots meta tag to prevent this, the User-agent name of the Rbate spider is "Rbot".

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