FAQs - Rbate Maker

Frequently Asked Questions
(Product Maker Perspective)

What services does Rbate offer to manufacturers and service providers?

Rbate offers six services to product makers. You can choose which combination of services you wish to use (with some restrictions, as indicated below). The services are:
- A way to find out which professional sources of consumer advice (reviews, demonstrators, consultants, etc.) are covering each of your products, and which of these consumers are most using. This is a free service.
- An easy and low-overhead way to offer and pay cash rebates to those who buy your products.
- An easy way to survey those who buy your products. Requires use of the rebate payment service.
- A way to get intelligence on lost sales by surveying those who buy competing products. Requires prior use of the rebate payment service.
- A way to (1), encourage consumer advice providers to better cover your products, (2), fund those providers who help your customers, and (3), find out which works and services have given your customers the most help. Requires use of the rebate payment service.
- The ability to list your products in Rbate's product search engine. Free, but requires prior use of Rbate's paid services.
Other than the cost of claim codes, there are no up-front payments. You are only charged for tangible results after a product was sold — your customer was helped, your customer was rewarded, your customer gives you feedback, someone else's customer gives you feedback — increasing sales. Better than paying for the chance of an eyeball on an ad or a webpage.
You can give Rbate a try by creating a Rbate Maker account.
How does Rbate work?

For product makers that take advantage of all Rbate's services, Rbate works like this:
- Rbate gives product makers a way to offer and pay low-overhead cash rebates to purchasers of their products.
- When purchasers submit a rebate claim on Rbate.com they are given an easy way to cite the services, publications, and other media that helped them make their choice.
- Purchaser citations determine the distribution of a bonus the product maker pays to those helpers that are registered with Rbate, fulfilling their published bonus offer, and funding those help providers that have prompted the sale.
- Because help providers are able to browse available bonus offers, these offers also encourage a general increase in the amount of consumer help that involves products that attract a Rbate bonus.
- Rbate also provides makers with the means to survey purchasers of both their products and other makers' products during the rebate claim process.
- The services the maker has purchased from and through Rbate have only been incurred following the sale of a product, have helped make that sale happen, and result in improved help to, and feedback from, their customer base, increasing future sales.
A full description of how Rbate works can be found here.
What benefits does Rbate offer manufacturers and service providers?

If you are an organization that manufacturers or distributes goods, or that supplies services, Rbate allows you to
- Encourage organizations that provide consumers with product-related information, evaluation, recommendation, demonstration, or trial services (including stores) to start or expand work on your products, reducing your reliance on advertising as a way for consumers to learn about your products,
- Monitor both the creation and use of media and services that help consumers evaluate your products,
- Help fund those services that purchasers of your products declare helped them decide to make that purchase,
- Get post-purchase feedback, not only from purchasers of your own products, but also from purchasers of other makers' products in nominated product markets,
- Provide low-overhead, region-specific cash rebates to purchasers of your products, and
- Make consumers and potential help providers aware of your new products through listing in a product-only search engine.
Rbate would complement your existing advertising program, increasing your sales by reaching the people and places that advertising can not.
Explore the alternative and register for a Rbate Maker account here.
Why encourage and fund consumer advice providers when I can advertise instead?

Advertising is becoming less effective as busy, streetwise, and bombarded consumers increasingly discount ads, ignore ads, use do-not-contact lists and technologies such as digital video recorders and on-line blockers to actively bypass ads, or simply purchase their entertainment and information outright. Are we seeing advertising's final flare, consuming the last of its consumer goodwill, before its collapse to a ember of its former self?
Some consumers, often technical experts who provide advice to friends and family, pay little attention to advertising, disliking its push-based nature, instead seeking product information on-demand. The number of these early-disadopters is growing.
Moreover advertising delivers uncertain results — whether it's the up-front payments required for direct, circulation-charged, or impression-charged advertising, or the poor value-for-money and possibility of fraud with click-charged advertising. Fraud also occurs with online impression-charged advertising, where you can be paying to have your ad seen by a software robot or ad-blocker program.
Other alternatives to advertising, such as price-based co-marketing distribution deals with retailers, squeeze margins by failing to draw on the quality of products and brands, while simple product placement, endorsements, advertorials, and branded content are either subtle and ineffective or risk a backlash if too overt.
In an affluent society, time and satisfaction are more important than brand and price. Shoppers want help that allows them to most quickly and reliably find and buy a product with which they will be happy. Media and services that provide product evaluations, product recommendations, and product demonstrations are often the decisive factor in consumer choice, most particularly for large purchases, but also for smaller recurrent purchases where the number of alternatives is large. Such information can fulfil the same role as advertising in creating awareness, understanding, vibe, and desire, and Rbate makes it easy for consumers to browse such information by allowing them to request email alerts when new help-related media and services are available in their current areas of interest.
Consumers want trustworthy information they can find easily, use freely, and digest quickly. Professional providers of purchasing help have a stake in maintaining a reputation for accuracy, honesty, and breadth of knowledge and experience, and have the resources to prepare and present information in an a form that's easy to understand. Rbate's search engine makes these providers easy to find, and your bonus payments allow many of these services to be freely offered.
Your bonus offers encourage these services to work with your products — but you only fund these services to the precise extent that they inform purchasers in a way that results in a sale. You make no payment for any work that informed a lost sale, whether that work's overall assessment of your product was positive, neutral, or negative.
Despite knowing its flaws, you may be continuing to use advertising as your main promotional tool because you saw no alternative. We invite you to explore your new options.
Aren't there plenty of product reviews already available?

Very few professional review, recommendation, and demonstration services are wholly and directly funded by consumers through either subscriptions or fees. Consumers baulk at paying subscriptions for information they'll only occasionally make use of, and, except for some large or complex purchases such as property and insurance, are not willing to pay fees for a service that may end up not being that helpful. Reviews in magazines and newspapers are partially funded by subscriptions, but this subscription revenue is slowly drying up in the face of freely-accessible information on the Web.
Without the backing of subscriptions or fees, reviews must be funded by advertising, while recommendation and demonstration services are usually tied to a sales service. However, as stated in the previous answer, advertising's decreasing effectiveness means that it is not a secure way to fund purchasing advice services. Moreover, the general move of just about everything to an ad-funded model spreads the limited pool of advertising dollars more thinly. To boost advertising revenue some online review sites riddle their work with distracting advertising, or resort to excessive pagination (via short pages or long-winded expositions) in order to maximize advertising impressions.
Likewise, the potential of product recommendation or demonstration services is limited by them being adjuncts to sales services. Such services will either sell a limited range of brands (e.g. a car dealer), or often won't make too much effort to compare alternatives in case the consumer ultimately purchases from a low-service discount outlet. Many online review sites are also effectively involved in sales via links to affiliated retailers or price-comparison services, but miss out on any affiliate revenue if a purchase is made of a different product, or at a different time.
Aside from these professional review services, purchasing advice can be obtained through reviews and advice from other consumers. The trouble with information and opinion given by consumers is that it usually reflects only one person's experience with one product, is often terse, poorly-written, un-illustrated, anonymous, and unreliable, and it comes burried among a large number of similar postings. Your brands can be damaged by incorrect and badly skewed information. Such consumer feedback would however become a valuable resource if a professional service was able to invest the time to edit and aggregate them, tracking a product's performance through its lifecycle.
In summary, because of inadequate funding the potential of reviews and related services is not being realized. By encouraging such services to work with your products through bonus offers, and by funding those services in proportion to the help they give your customers through your bonus payments, you give a significant boost to the quality of information and advice about your products that is made available to potential purchasers. You would see creation of many new services dedicated to providing consumers with purchasing assistance — services that are more likely to be free, ad-free, and independent of any sales service. For example, websites that provide automated purchasing advice, free recommendation services that consumers can call, and businesses dedicated providing consumers with product demonstrations and try-outs.
Will consumers and help providers have confidence in the integrity of the bonus funding system?

Consumers want to be confident that the advice they receive is unbiased, so Rbate only allows professional creators of media and services that provide consumers with purchasing help to register as Rbate Helpers. Such organizations have a reputation to protect, in contrast to systems where disclosed or undisclosed bonuses can be earned by "friends", "affiliates", "bloggers", or presenters of media testimonials.
Further, Rbate makes it possible for a consumer to see the way that a Helper has chosen to handle both bonus payments and bonus offer information. This can include an editorial policy statement, in which Helpers describe how they ensure that the receipt of bonuses does not influence the opinions they offer (though it will likely influence the type, subject, and intensity of the work they do). Consumers access this information via links found on results returned by searches performed on Rbate's purchasing help search engine.
Recovery of product selection service fees from suppliers is already well established for mortgage, insurance, and investment brokers. Rbate simply extends this model to professional services and media that help people purchase all other types products and services, as well as eliminating the need for any direct relationship between product suppliers and the organizations that evaluate their products.
Such an open and professional system gives all participants confidence that it is working to their mutual benefit.
How can Rbate increase the sales of my products?

Each of Rbate's services works to increase sales of your products.
Your bonus offers increase the quality and quantity of assistance available to potential purchasers. Existing Helpers are given an incentive to start or improve their coverage of your products, while new Helpers are encouraged to begin offering information and advice about those products.
The prospect of bonus income will lead to new types of purchasing help being offered, such as automated purchase advisors, and businesses dedicated to providing personal advice and demonstrations, making it easier for potential purchasers to discover your product, and to see to if it suits. Consumers can easily find these media and services by using Rbate's dedicated purchasing help search engine.
Because purchasing advice as been so hard for consumers to track down and use, many consumers have learned a helplessness when it comes to comparison shopping, accepting that they will usually have to take a punt and be stuck with their choice for better or worse. Advice that is easy to find and use can change this thinking, opening consumers minds away from a focus on price, availability, and familiarity.
Like some mortgage, insurance, and investment brokers, some Helpers may decide to only work with products that offer bonuses over some threshold amount. Alternatively, Helpers may respond to higher bonuses by devoting more resources to those products. This could manifest as better trained staff (reviewers, consultants, and demonstrators), more detailed analysis (both on product launch and over the product's lifecycle), clearer, more detailed consumer presentations, or, if the Helper is a retailer, a decision to stock the product. Fractions of your bonus payments can be forwarded to contributing Helpers, providing an incentive for Helpers to collaborate to present information in a way that makes it easier for consumers to find comfort in an informed choice.
While your bonus offers encourage a general increase in the help available to your potential customers, your bonus payments are precisely targeted to maximize the quality of help available to your future customers. Bonuses are paid for work that led to a current sale, cumulatively providing the most support to those services that have made the most difference, both to consumers and to product sales (even if some those Helpers have chosen not to be able to see the bonuses on offer). Both your bonus offers and bonus payments increase product visibility and consumer understanding, priming future sales.
Your Rbate account provides you with valuable information on Helper activity connected with your products. You can see which professionally-created or professionally-edited material and services are covering your product, which of these consumers are using the most, and, if you offer bonuses, which have given the most help to your customers. This ability to track the newest, most influential, and most highly regarded sources of information about your products (including collections or digests of consumer-written reviews) gives you valuable feedback on your work.
Your rebate payments need not only act as an incentive for purchasers to complete the claim process, but can be used both as an incentive to purchase and as a customer reward. If you use Rbate's secure labels, or if you sell online and deliver your Rbate claim codes by email, the rebates you offer through Rbate have, like coupons, low overheads. But unlike coupons you do not need to make arrangements for retailers to accept them. You can if you like use Rbate solely to provide purchaser rebates, promoting your product and earning bid credits; there is no requirement to simultaneously offer helper bonuses or to issue survey questions.
When you survey your rebate claimers you can find out why they decided to buy your product, and what they like and don't like about what they've bought after their initial period of use. This can guide improvements in both marketing material and in the products themselves. You can also gather customer contact information to initiate and maintain customer relationships.
If you use Rbate's bid question service you can ask consumers why they purchased a competing product, telling you how to tweak your products and pitch to capture more customers.
Finally, listing your products in Rbate's product search engine allows both early adopters and Helpers to be notified when you release a new product, and allows consumers to see your product when they use the service to search or browse for something they're after.
Each Rbate service can be seen to offer excellent return on your investment.

What is Rbate's fee schedule?

As well as the charges for downloaded claim codes and claim code stickers, Rbate charges the following claim-related fees:

Processing and payment of rebate claims	$0.75 USD per claim.
Brokerage of Helper services	$1.60 USD per claim with full bonus payment, pro-rata for partial payments, nil where no Rbate-registered help has been rendered.
Survey question answers from your customers	$0.10 USD per answer.
Survey question answers from non-customers	$0.25 USD + 10% of bid amount (90% of bid amount is paid to answerer).

There is a $15 USD charge for deposits made to Rbate's U.S. bank account via wire, and a $4.00 USD base fee for each withdrawal from one of your currency balances. Extra fees may be charged for some withdrawal methods, the applicable fee being displayed when the withdrawal method is selected.

When paying non-USD rebates from your USD balance, or 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.

10% Goods and Services Tax is added to all charges applied to Maker account holders located in Australia, with the exception of charges for secure stickers.

Are my Rbate balances safe?

Rbate is not a bank, so the currency balances in Rbate Maker accounts are not government insured. However Rbate makes no operational use of these funds, holding them in trust to apply when either a consumer claim is submitted or claim codes are ordered. No account-access or maintenance fees are charged.
Each of your currency balances need only be sufficient to prevent claims from being unexpectedly rejected due to lack of funds to pay rebates, bonuses, and Rbate fees. That is they should cover the expected value of consumer claims until you can respond to either a low balance warning from Rbate or the low balance itself by topping up the balance in question.
If you have over-deposited in one of your currency accounts you can request a withdrawal.
Your balances are refunded if you close your Rbate Maker account.
What intelligence does Rbate provide about my products and services?

Rbate provides you with information about those who purchase your products, information from those who purchase competing products, information about which media and services are offering information and advice about your products, and information about which media and services were used by your customers.
For each product in the products table on the the Products Page of your account you can view the following quantities, totalled over the selected date range.
- The number of rebate claims made for that product.
- Your rebate redemption rate (claims to codes ratio). Use this to measure the sufficiency of your consumer rebates.
- The number of Rbate-registered media or service entities (Help Entities) that have covered or are covering that product. Click on this number to see a list of the twenty most recently-created entities.
- The number of times these media and services have been Rmarked by Rbate-registered consumers — one measure of the aggregate use consumers are making of these entities. Even if the number of Help Entities is small, the number of Rmarks will be high if some of them are highly popular. Click on this number to view a list of these publications and services in reducing order of Rmark count.
- The total citation credit for that product. Citation credit measures the aggregate help that Help Entities have rendered to purchasers of your products, independent of the bonus amount, which together determines your total bonus spending. Click on this number to view an entity list ordered from most help rendered to least help rendered.
- Your total spending on this product in US Dollar terms. Click this figure to see a break-down into its rebate, bonus, and fee components. This information is also viewable via the account transactions links on the Account Page.
How do I add my product to Rbate's product search engine?

Listing your product in Rbate's product search engine allows both consumers and potential helpers to learn about your product. Search engine users can ask to be emailed when a new product is listed that matches a particular combination of search terms, product category, and area of availability.
A product will be included in the index when (1), the product has been assigned a product category, (2), the "List in Search Index" box is checked when the product is saved on the Products Page, and (3), your total spending on claim codes and Rbate fees equals or exceeds $10 USD times the number of products you wish to have indexed, added in the order in which they were registered with Rbate. This third condition is designed to improve the quality of the product index.
What is a Rebate Group?

A Rebate Group is a collection of claim code orders that share both a common consumer rebate currency amount, and a common consumer survey. They usually correspond to the claim codes you distribute for and with a product in a given country or territory, but may also be created for particular marketing campaigns. Like products, Rebate Groups are identified by a private handle of your choice.
View the Rebate Groups for a given product by clicking on the "show" link in Rebate Groups column of the product's row in the product table on the Products Page.
What value of consumer rebate should I offer?

Consumer rebate amounts and currencies can be set independently for each Rebate Group. It is up to you to set the level of consumer rebates you offer, but it's in your interest that they be sufficient to encourage diligent completion of the claim process. One restriction is that consumer rebates must be a whole number of units of the currency in which the rebate is denominated. For example, a given number of dollars, and no cents.
You also have the freedom to supplement a rebate for any other marketing reason, including promotions and discounting, or to offer rebates solely for this purpose (without any bonus or survey). Rebate payments also earn you bid credits.
Consumers respond well to cash rewards, particularly if they are easy to claim. Hard-to-claim rebates, the offer of prize-draw entries, or requests that consumers give their time and information freely, can be effective in the short-term and with certain people, but interest and goodwill wanes as the effort or odds become apparent. Cash rebates gain you the best quality information from the widest range of purchasers, for the longest possible time. They can also form part of a promotional coupon system.
Given the information you receive, and your access to the sales-boosting Rbate bonus system, Rbate purchaser rebates are good value for money, particularly if you currently offer rebates by either redemption or coupon.
How do purchasers claim their rebates?

Purchasers claim their rebates by visiting rbate.com/claim and entering a unique 15-character claim code. Only one in many millions of claim code combinations is valid and active, and techniques are employed to detect automated claim attempts, so it is extremely unlikely for a non-purchaser to make a successful claim (there is no Maker liability for any claim where a code was guessed).
After entering a valid code, purchasers are led through the process of citing the media and services they found helpful. This step is skipped if a helper bonus is not currently active for the claim product.
The next step is the buyer's survey, skipped if no survey has been specified for the claim code's Rebate Group. Bid questions, if any, follow the maker's survey.
Claimers are then asked to supply a payment account into which their rebates are paid.
When the claim process is complete your Rbate currency accounts are debited for the value of the rebate, the full or partial USD helper bonus payment (if applicable), plus Rbate fees.
Click here to perform a test claim.
How am I charged for purchaser rebates?

Rebates are charged against the currency balances you hold in your Rbate account. At present, rebate amounts for a Rebate Group can be set in the following currencies: US Dollars, Australian Dollars, British Pounds, New Zealand Dollars, Canadian Dollars, South African Rand, Euros, and Singapore Dollars. If at the time of a claim your account balance in the rebate currency is insufficient to cover the rebate, Rbate will attempt to pay the rebate from your US Dollar balance using a currency conversion, eliminating the need for you to hold balances in all currencies in which you offer rebates. If your US Dollar balance likewise has insufficient credit, the consumer claim will be refused.
At the present time, if this occurs claimers will be told to try again later, and you will be sent an email indicating that a claim was refused due to insufficient credit, and that you have two business days to deposit funds. After this two day grace period those who make subsequent claim attempts will be informed that you have been deliquent in your responsibility to fund your promised rebates, and they will be directed to contact you to resolve the matter. Rbate may withdraw the courtesy of a grace period from accounts that abuse it.
How do purchasers obtain the claim code for their rebate claim?

You order claim codes from Rbate in multiples of 1000, either as downloadable raw code sets, or as rolls of rebate stickers, on which the codes are concealed. You then distribute these codes with the appropriate products. Consumers submit their claim on Rbate.com using these codes. Rbate handles all processing and payment of these claims.
Claim codes can be purchased through the Rebate Groups link for the product in question, found on the Products Page of your Rbate account. You can either pay for these labels from your USD account balance, or by credit card using Google Checkout.
When should I use Rbate-printed secure rebate labels?

Rbate-printed secure rebate labels allow you to offer and pay cash rebates to purchasers without the need for the purchaser to contact you. Rolls of these self-adhesive labels can be ordered from Rbate and placed either inside product packaging, on the outside of product packaging, or on invoices. Each label holds a secured claim code.
A sample of a secure rebate label is shown below.

The labels are 4" x 2.5" (101.6mm x 63.5mm), supplied on rolls of 1000 stickers, suitable for both machine and manual application.
The brand name of the product (created through the Profile Page, and selected on the Products Page), will be printed on the label as the Maker offering the rebate. Orders of 20 000 or more labels are eligible to have this name printed the form of a brand logo. See the brand logo option on the Profile Page to set-up this capability.
Label IDs are printed in the lower-right corner of each sticker. The upper number is the label's code order reference number, while the lower number is consecutive within each code order. To identify an unknown label and its roll, enter the upper number in the "Code order" box at the top of each page of your Rbate.com account, then press the enter key. The label's Rebate Group and code order will be displayed.
Rbate secure rebate labels hide the claim code under a scratch-off coating, over which is placed a zip-off plastic film that both protects the coating and makes tampering both difficult and easy to detect. The label instructs purchasers and salespeople to check that the code has not been revealed prior to the item's purchase, which is made easier by having the code printed on a red background under the scratch-off panel.
Salespeople should also be informed as to which products will be carrying rebate labels external to their packaging, allowing them to make sure labels have neither been removed (the packaging will be damaged, or label remnants are likely to be present), or a tampered label obscured. It would be helpful if consumers were also told to expect the presence of a rebate label.
If you discover, or if your supply chain informs you, that stickers or products have been stolen, or that claim codes have been improperly revealed, please let Rbate know. If you contact us no more than two weeks after the incident, and can quote the range of label IDs involved, we will be able prevent claims being paid on the codes in question. So please keep a record of the label IDs associated with each batch of stickers you distribute, or each movement of goods you make.
As an aid to detecting theft or fraud, Rbate will advise you if we detect an unusual number of claims for a single product that have similar payment account details.
What is the cost of Rbate secure rebate labels?

The following charges apply to each order of secure sticker labels:

Thousands of labels in the order Price per label, USD

1-9 0.50

10-99 0.28

100-249 0.17

250-999 0.06

1000+ 0.04

plus UPS shipping charges and a $15 USD per order handling charge.

At present, stickers are only able to be delivered to those countries listed in the destination address country selector in the code order form on the Rebate Group page.
When should I use raw downloaded claim codes?

Raw claim codes are supplied as a downloadable file, which contains one claim code per line. These should be used when you do not wish to use secure rebate labels. This may be because you either wish to print your own labels, sell products directly to consumers or otherwise obtain purchaser contact information at point of sale, or wish to first communicate with the purchaser in order to verify their purchase through supply of a product serial number or invoice before directly supplying them with a claim code.
When you supply a claim code to a customer you should direct them to make their cashback claim at Web address rbate.com/claim. You can save the customer from having to enter the claim code at the Rbate site by appending the claim code to the Web address: e.g. rbate.com/claim/A9YK7-Z82JC-6VY5W.
What is the cost of raw downloaded claim codes?

The only charge for downloaded claim codes is a 1 US cent per-code deposit. The deposit is required because claim codes are a limited resource. A downloaded claim code's deposit is refunded to your USD account when a consumer completes a rebate claim using that code.
What is a helper bonus? How much should they be?

Helper bonuses provide a way for you to encourage providers of purchasing advice to work with your products. They may review your products, provide consumers with recommendations and information about your products, demonstrate your products, offer trials or samples of your products, or choose, buy, & deliver your products. The bonuses you pay support those media and services whose work has been associated with sales of your products.
If a purchaser submits a rebate claim at a time when you have set an active helper bonus for the purchased product, the rebate claimer will be asked to nominate which services, publications, and other media helped them decide to purchase that product. If a Rbate-registered service or piece of material (known as a Help Entity) is cited by the purchaser, the Helper organization that created or operates that entity is paid from your helper bonus in proportion to the strength of that citation ("very helpful" or "helpful"), and in inverse proportion to the total number of citations. You are charged neither the bonus nor Rbate's brokerage fee for the portion of the cited help that is outside the Rbate system: self-help, private help, informal help, and help from advice providers not registered with Rbate. No bonus or fee is charged if no Rbate-registered entities are cited. Fractions of your bonuses may be distributed to other Helpers if the cited works depend on the work of others, as tracked in Rbate's contribution network.
When you set a helper bonus you are also asked to set an expiry date, before which the bonus amount cannot be reduced (and this expiry date cannot be brought forward). The bonus amount, bonus expiry date, and the claim code expiry dates for that product together form an active bonus offer, which Helpers can choose to view through their Rbate accounts, alongside other offers in that and other product categories.
Helpers will expect bonus offers to be sufficiently large and sufficiently prolonged that it is worth their while to consider whether they should change the work they do in response. Therefore, as well as a firm period of validity, the value of each bonus offer not must be below a limit that Rbate has set for each category of product. This will often be few percent of the average price of products in that category. You will not therefore be able to set a helper bonus for a product until that product has been assigned a product category.
To get a better response from Helpers, you should offer a higher bonus than the category minimum limit (while ensuring your offer is valid for a sufficiently long period of time). To help you evaluate the competitiveness of your offer, the minimum-limit, minimum, average, and maximum bonus offers in a product's market (category and availability region), taken over all Makers, is shown for each of your Rbate-registered products displayed on the Products Page of your account. Clicking on these values takes you to a bid projection page where you can see how these values will evolve as a consequence of the current expiry dates of these competiting offers. You can evaluate the effect of a bonus offer by tracking changes in the number of covering Help Entities, Rmarks, and sales/claims for the product in question.
Remember that helper bonuses are only paid after a purchaser makes a rebate claim following the sale of one of your products, and only to the extent that the media and services the purchaser cites were both Rbate-registered and instrumental in the purchaser's choice. Helper bonuses therefore offer excellent return on your investment in the Rbate service. This is particularly true if Rbate bonuses replace some of the affiliate payments you currently offer.
How do I survey product purchasers?

You have the ability to survey purchasers of both your and your competitor's products when purchasers claim their rebate. Rbate charges a fee for each survey question answered by a product purchaser. Purchasers can give valuable feedback, and are a more select group that random individuals enticed to complete surveys solely for a promised reward.
Purchasers are asked to delay making their rebate claim until they have made some use of the product they have purchased, allowing you to get better feedback on consumers' opinion of your products. As part of the survey you can also ask questions about why the purchaser chose your product, and request identifying information about the purchaser.
If you use a Rbate buyer's survey to request personal identifying information from purchasers, you agree to fully describe, in either the text of the relevant questions or in the survey introduction text, the use to which that information will be put, and the nature of any third-parties to which this information may be disclosed. If you fail to abide by this condition Rbate reserves the right to either disable the surveys in question, or to refund your account balances and terminate access to your account.
Surveys are created on the Surveys Page of your Rbate Maker account, and selected on Rebate Group pages.
You create a reservoir of survey questions in the left column of the Surveys Page, and drag and drop these into question lists in the right column, forming surveys. Survey questions and surveys can currently only be created in English, however support for multi-language survey questions and surveys is forthcoming.
Four types of multiple-choice questions are currently supported: single choice answer, single choice with "other" write-in answer, multi-choice answer, and multi-choice answer with "other" option. In addtion there are question types for answers of type text, date, location, product-category, and contact details (name, address, & email). Finally there is a message "question" type that allows surveys and survey sections to be introduced with a piece of text.
Texts of survey questions, survey question options, and survey introductions can make use of the following HTML tags: u, i, b, br, p, ul, ol, li, sub, and sup (enter < as <). To edit each of these these texts, as well as the handle names of questions and surveys, click them, edit them, then use the Enter key to confirm your changes. (Use Shift-Enter to move to a new line in the editing area.)
If a set of questions you wish purchasers to answer depend on an option the purchaser selected in an earlier answer, you can use the jump capability. To use this, click on the arrow that appears to the right of each question and each question option in the current-survey (right) column, and select the question you wish the purchaser to next answer once that question has been answered, or once that option has been selected. Survey-takers using JavaScript-enabled browsers will see the survey change as questions are answered, so that relevant questions are the only ones shown. When JavaScript is disabled instructions as to which question should be answered next are instead presented. You can see how a survey will look and work for purchasers by clicking on the Test link, located right of the current-survey title. You are not charged any Rbate fee for survey questions that are jumped over.
For each option in each multiple choice question the percentage rate at which that option has been selected is shown down the question's right column. These statistics are shown both for the question itself (across all surveys in which that question is present), as well as for answers given to that question in the survey displayed in the right column. A link is provided to search, view, and download the set of text responses given for both "other" options and questions having text answers. The "Responses" link allows you to view and download individual response sets for the current survey.
How do I survey those who decided to purchase a competitor's product?

Because it is helpful to know why you lost a particular sale, Rbate allows you to survey those who purchased products made by other Makers. This is done by using the Q.Bids Page to bid for the right to pose a particular question to those who claim rebates on products in particular markets (each a region+category), and to receive an answer to that question. Ninety percent of a successful bid is paid to the claimer who has answered the question. Your own bid questions are never asked during claims on your own products.
To use the bid facility, first create the survey question(s) you wish to ask using the left-hand column of the Surveys Page. Unlike the questions you can ask in surveys given to purchasers of your own products, you may not ask for any identifying information, nor attempt to contact the purchaser. This keeps customer details private.
After creating a question, either move to the Q.Bids Page and click the button, or click on the Bid button for that question to automatically select that question as the subject of a bid.
Each bid is associated with a product category and product distribution region, targeting the bid at all products in all markets that overlap both this category and region. You cannot at present specify that your question be given only to purchasers of specific products, however when you view the answers to text-response questions you are shown the name of the product associated with each answer.
You bid for the right to ask, and to receive an answer for, one of the limited number of bid questions (currently 3) that Rbate asks each rebate claimer. You can set a maximum amount for each bid, but are only ever charged the 4th highest maximum bid in each market (i.e. the highest unsuccessful bid), or $0.10 USD if there are less than four bids, plus the Rbate fee.
An answer credit system is also used to ensure that Makers who offer rebates and bonuses don't feel exploited by competitors, who can question their customers but, by avoiding offering rebates, do not allow their own customers to be surveyed.
Bids can only be successful in markets in which you have earned bid credit by paying a rebate in that, or a closely related, market. A credit fraction is deducted each time your bid is successful, and you receive an answer.
A bid can be set to inactivate when a spending limit has been reached, and bids can either be manually deleted or set to expire at midnight UTC on a given date.
Further instructions for placing question bids can be found on the bid details form on the Q.Bids Page.
You will be emailed when a bid becomes active or inactive due to changes in your bid amount, changes in the amounts bid by others, credit changes following claims, bid expiry, or bid spending limits being reached.
View both text responses and the statistics of the multiple-choice answers you receive to bid questions in the normal way on the Surveys Page. Rbate does not charge you for questions that the claimer does not answer, or if Rbate detects that a text answer is effectively blank. Rbate can not however guarantee that every charged answer will be useful or meaningful, so account for some attrition when deciding on your maximum bids.
How can I audit Rbate's work?

By withholding some claim codes from distribution you can assure yourself that Rbate is only charging for claims that result from purchases of your products, and is not improperly processing claims on other claim codes. From the code order status column of a product's Rebate Groups page you can download the list of redeemed claim codes for a code order. You should check that withheld codes do not appear on these lists.
Assess the sufficiency of a product's consumer rebate by its claim redemption rate, as displayed in the product table. And other than through sales volume, gauge the effectiveness of your bonus offers and bonus payments for each product by tracking the number of covering entities, the number of Rmarks, the level of citation credit, and your total spending.
Unlike some content-matching advertising brokers that take an unspecified proportion of the advertiser's bid, you are able to view a full breakdown of your spending on each product: rebates, bonuses, and the fees Rbate has charged for its rebate agency and bonus brokerage services.
How do I close my Rbate account?

If all your currency balances are nil, click the "DELETE MY RBATE ACCOUNT" button on your Profile Page.
Otherwise, first request withdrawals for each of your balances via the Account page. When you request the final withdrawal, check the box to request that your account be closed and deleted. If you do this your account will be automatically deleted after your last balance has been refunded.
Your account cannot be deleted if you have active claim codes.

Thousands of labels in the order	Price per label, USD
1-9	0.50
10-99	0.28
100-249	0.17
250-999	0.06
1000+	0.04

Frequently Asked Questions(Product Maker Perspective)

General

Products

Rebates

Bonuses

Survey Questions

Miscellaneous

Frequently Asked Questions
(Product Maker Perspective)