New QuickRewards blog (VERY IMPORTANT)

The new QuickRewards blog is here! You can visit it by clicking on BLOG icon on the QR homepage when you login or using the following url:
http://blog.quickrewards.net/

Why is this blog better?
-You not longer need a Google account to participate. You just need to be a QR member.
-You now can earn 5 tokens daily to participate in the blog
-More contests
-Easier navigation and more content
-Ability to interact with other members and QR staff

VERY IMPORTANT:
You should still save this google url in case our servers go down. If QR is down we will use this google blog to keep you updated.

May Frequent Shopper Club Promotion

We are currently in the process of reconstructing our frequent shopper program to make it more fun and rewarding. While we are doing that I decided to create a rewarding May promotion which is super simple. The more you shop, the bigger the bonus per order is. Just follow this chart:
Amount of orders in May      Bonus Per Order
3-5       $0.15 per order
6-10       $0.25 per order
11-25       $0.50 per order
26+       Flat $15 bonus
*At least 75% of the orders must be $25 or more before shipping/tax/coupons
**All the orders must be placed on or after May 1st until May 31st. It is ok if the orders don’t credit on May 31st and credit a few days later. We count the order date not when the instant creditor picks up the order.
***Ebay transactions are excluded from this bonus (see below for Ebay tiers).

Tier for EBAY
Amount of orders in May       Bonus Per Order
3-5       $0.05 per order
6-10       $0.10 per order
11+       $0.15 per order
*At least 75% of the Ebay orders must be $5 or more before shipping/tax/coupons

CLAIMING BONUSES:
Email support@quickrewards.net the first week of June with the total amount of orders (starting MAY 1) to receive the bonus.

Very important update regarding surveys

***PLEASE LET OTHERS KNOW ABOUT THIS UPDATE***

Later in the week we will be signing a contract with a new survey company. Because of that we changed the surveys section. Partnering with this company will allow us to distribute a lot more $1-$10 targeted surveys. In order for you to receive them you MUST fill out a quick one page profiler we created.

In order to fill out the profiler go to SURVEYS section and then you will see a box on the left that says take a profiler. Failure to fill out this profiler will mean that you will only see daily surveys or non-targeted surveys.

Let us know if you have any questions.

The Children's Place is back!

QuickRewards is proud to announce that one of our most popular stores The Children's Place is back in our shopping section! You will receive 3.1% cash back per order.

New idea waiting for your feedback

I was thinking of this idea for a while, but today I had some free time so I decided to just ask you about it.

There are a lot of members that shop online frequently and find a lot of very good deals that are just unbelievable. I was thinking of making a contest or rewarding those who share deals with other members. For example if today Kohl’s is selling item X at 50% off and there is also a 20% off QR coupon not many members will know about this, but one member will. Would members be interested in sharing their great deals/finds on the blog? Of course it would need to be a merchant that QR has in the shopping section. If this merchant also has coupons I would edit the blog and add the coupons to maximize the savings and maybe even increase the % cash back rate. If a deal that someone posts is popular (other members place an order to buy this item or take advantage of this sale) this specific member gets some kind of a bonus. What you think about this? Are there QR shoppers who would participate in this? We would need more than one person to help us with this to make it possible.


UPDATED QUESTION: Do you all want to start this right away or wait until the QR blog comes out later in the week (I hope)

Blog Game: Unscramble the words

WOW THIS ONE WAS SO MUCH MORE POPULAR THEN I THOUGHT. I AM GOING TO ASK THE TECH AFTER THEY FINISH THE NEW QR BLOG TO MAKE THIS ONE A DAILY GAME WERE EVERYONE WILL WIN. IT WILL NOT PAY $1(NO WAY WE CAN AFFORD THAT), BUT IT WILL GIVE EVERYONE A CHANCE TO WIN.


Answers:
BODY
PHYSICS
MILITARY

Here are the 10 $1 winners:
1. wchau81
2. dleora
3. mcastillanes
4. Samplynn
5. iluvdisney
6. megmeg74
7. aunttam
8. jollyjen3
9. Spitfire
10. tkela

PLEASE EMAIL SUPPORT@QUICKREWARDS.NET TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE


Let’s test a blog game to see how well it works. The object of the game is simple. Unscramble these 3 words and email your answers to support@quickrewards.net. The first 10 members to email us the correct answers to all 3 will receive $1 QR credit. We will post the winners on the blog once we get 10 correct responses.

Example: LASTA unscrambled is ATLAS

3 words to unscramble:
DBYO
PYICHSS
RYMITILA

***YOU MAY TELL YOUR FRIENDS THE ANSWERS AS LONG AS IT'S OUTSIDE OUR BLOG.

Once the 10 members email us we will end this game and based on how popular it will be decide if we should continue with it or not.

CONTEST: What I would like to see on the blog….

We are in the process of redesigning the blog so that we can have our own internal blog and not use this Google one. This will allow all QR members to communicate since you will not need a Google account to post. Our own blog will also allow us to have more flexibility in terms of bumping content up (Google does not let me do that) as well as post multiple subjects at once without you having to scroll down the blog. Another great benefit (for our Monthly blog contest) is that you will no longer have to scroll down through 100 responses. There will also be more member interaction.

Contest:
We want to know what you would like to see in the new blog. What do you like/don’t like about this current blog. Any suggestions on what the new blog should focus on?

Leave a comment or send a response to support@quickrewards.net. Later next week we will select two winners. Each will receive a choice of M or XL QuickRewards Tshirt!

April Blog Contest

Last year on our forum we had a very popular thread called WHAT CREDITED TODAY which helped many members decide which offers are good/bad and what credits. It also gave the members the ability to discuss offers. Since our forum is not even close to being complete (this project is not a top priority for us at this stage because of a bigger idea in the works) I decided to use the blog to bring this contest back.


Prizes: 10 winners $2 each (According to our last poll members wanted to see smaller prizes, but more winners)


LAST PROMO $5 WINNERS (email support@quickrewards.net to claim the bonus)

USERNAME: Mike S
USERNAME: rkeffer
USERNAME: Janice
USERNAME: rumrunnergirl
USERNAME: Warior Dragon

How to enter:
Simply post a comment with offer(s) that credited to your account today and let us know your experience with them(if you like). You can enter daily.

Introducing new donation option: Project Linus

A long time Quickrewards member is the area coordinator for Project Linus.

“Project Linus is a 100% volunteer non-profit organization. Our Mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of NEW HOMEMADE WASHABLE blankets and quilts lovingly created by volunteer blanketeers. We also provide a rewarding and fun service opportunity for interested individuals and groups to make blankets for hurting children. Many of our blanketeers cannot afford the costs of materials (fleece, yarn, fabric etc) so we provide this free to them through contributions to the San Jose Chapter of Project Linus.”

WEBSITE
http://sjlinus.org/

QuickRewards members can help Project Linus by donating their tokens (100,000 stacks) or cash balance ($1 stacks). Hopefully with everything we collect will allow Project Linus to give away a lot more blankets then they do now.

Scavenger Hunt is back!

We are going to repeat the scavenger hunt from two weeks again this coming Wednesday. Two weeks ago our database was not able to handle the huge amount of traffic, but now since we tweaked the database a bit we are ready to give it a try. We want to see if it will work well now. Please remember that the site might be slow again during that day and this scavenger hunt will be a very good indicator of if we fixed our database issue or not.

For those that don’t remember what it is here are all the details: Through the day we will randomly select 10+ offers in the SIGNUPS section. Each offer will give you a reward if you locate it ($0.01-$0.05) a click and up to 200% rate boost if you do it.

Let’s hope it works this time!

Good & Bad News

Bad News: We ended David’s cookies contest. The reason why we had to end it is because the MID offers just don’t credit as good as they used to in the good old days which means less people had the ability to participate in the contest. Did you enjoy the David’s cookies raffle? If I get a positive response we will bring it back.

Here is the last set of winners. Email support@quickrewards.net to claim the prizes:

QuickyPot total: 87,162 tokens. The winners are:
Curlymmv 43,581 tokens
Sharcj 26,149 tokens
Amyk 17,433 tokens

Davids Cookie Tin winner: rames316

Good News:
The QuickyPot will now be progressive. Instead of 3 winners every few weeks we will change the offer and divide the Quickypot among everyone. This way everyone wins! We also want to introduce: Wacky Rate Boost and Wacky Shopping Rate Boost. We will randomly boost rates of various offers and shopping merchants. Some boosts will be as high as 25-200%. The thing is that no one knows when these rates will end. We will keep changing them often.
Please let me know if you like the new idea or the old idea better. We will change it so that everyone is happy!

4 updates

1) We had another instant creditor jam so we are restarting it. All today's offers and yesterday's daily survey should be uploaded in a few hours
UPDATE: The instnat creditor is still not back to normal so it's ok that you are not seeing 3/17 surveys and 3/18 signups yet

2) Our click advertiser wants us to double the volume. 6 hour clicks will go back to hourly later today. Also look out for a new $0.01 Spiral Frog click.

3) We didn't double last month tokens yet. I hope we will this week. It's a long manual process so we are trying to make it automatic.

4) Why did my balance drop a bit today (this is only for about 100 members)
You saw a large unexpected increase to your account yesterday noon right? That is because some of the daily surveys you did on Friday or over the weekend credited multiple times for some reason. We ran a program to remove the duplicates.

Response to a QR complaint

I was reading one of the rewards program boards today and found a complaint about QR saying what’s going on with QR and if it’s going down the drain because today there is no Guess my number, no trivia, no emails and yesterday/today no one responded to their emails. I said this before so let me explain it again:

QuickRewards has been around since 2002 and we only have 4 employees. 2 out of the 4 are really very active (programmer and myself) while other two help out with the Paypal and gift cards. Putting up daily trivia, guess my number game and emails is my task. Others don’t know how to do it. If I am sick or am away one day (Sunday/Monday I went away with my family and unfortunately we had no internet access) and don’t put up the trivia/game/send paid email that DOES NOT MEAN that QR is going down the drain. QuickRewards has gained over 25,000 new members within the last few months because of advertising. This was a huge surprise to us that we didn’t expect and now we have twice the emails to answer daily then before while once again I am doing all the emails myself with no one helping me. We don’t have the money to hire more employees at this time and basic things like this (no game or trivia or late response to emails) can happen from time to time. Most other rewards programs don’t respond to emails for days so if you don’t get your response within a few hours I always tell our members to just resend it again. Not seeing a game up, not seeing a response to an email within minutes/hours is not something that should be a large concern or mean that QR is going downhill.

Just writing this to let you all know that you should consider that we are still a tiny company even though we might look big because of the brand loyaly we gained over the years. We are growing daily, but until we have the financial resources to hire more people please be patient with us about things like one day the trivia is put up late or the game is late and so on. QuickRewards is not going downhill and we are growing stronger and stronger everyday.
We got a huge contract today with an advertiser that no one else has and I can't wait until we announce them to you soon. It will be a new weekly activity for everyone to participate in.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Your opinion needed (we need as much feedback as we can get)

As you may know there is more and more fraud happening in the rewards program industry because of all the new sites showing up daily and they attract International members from countries advertisers don’t want traffic from. As a result a lot of new clients don’t want to deal with incentive sites because they all assume incentive sites have bad traffic. Since QuickRewards has been around since 2002 we already established a lot of relationships with advertisers so all these industry changes are not really effecting us. The thing is that I have a bunch of new clients who are skeptical about incentive traffic and they want to try QR out, but are afraid that because we have no minimum policy people will take advantage of their offers (no rewards program has these) specifically those who don’t live in US/CA and use a proxy.

I found a solution to please them and many other future advertisers, but wanted to ask for your opinion. If a majority of you think it’s a bad idea we will not do it since QuickRewards cares about your opinions. The best way to keep no minimum is to require that everyone redeeming for Paypal has a VERIFIED Paypal account. Verified account means that a real person (US or CA) owns the account because Paypal confirmed all the details with the bank or credit card company. QR does not allow international members to join (only US, CA, UK) and some international members who are not in these countries are using proxy to make us think that they are in US and redeem with a unverified Paypal account. We have been in this industry for 6 years now and know almost every trick in the book. We catch them and close their accounts right away, but if we had this rule they would not even bother joining. We always allowed members to redeem with unverified status, but I wanted to know if it will be a major issue if we no longer allowed that and required members to have a verified account?

I can even make a rule that if you don’t want to verify your paypal account (since it requires credit card or bank account connected to Paypal) you must redeem for a shipped gift certificate at least once. This way we know you have a physical US address. If you also were a long time QR member (over one year OR those that are less then one year and do more then just signups and trials (surveys and shopping)) and still have an unverified paypal we will not require you to verify it.

Why would this be a good change? It would allow us to get more advertisers (those who are afraid to advertise on incentive sites) and it would allow us to process payments faster too since we don’t need to check verified accounts as much as we would check unverified.

I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I don’t want to make a major decision without hearing what you all think about it.

Feb Token Doubling

We didn’t double Feb tokens yet for those who reached 100% or are a frequent shopper. We expect this to happen later in the week.

UPDATE 3/10 WE DID NOT DOUBLE THEM YET.

2 Day Shopping Rate Boost Promotional Rates

Thanks to those who voted on the blog regarding which merchants we should increase the shopping rates for. Here are the new 2 day only rates:

Advertiser Everyday Rate 2 Day Only Rate
4InkJets ------15%------ 20%
AVON------ 5.5% ------7.5%
Drugstore------ 6.5%------ 9%
Ebay---- 32% (cost to seller to list your item)------ 75%
Oldnavy/GAP ------3.1%/3.3% ------3.8%
Overstock.com ------3.6%------ 5%
Shoebuy ------12%------ 15%
VisaPrint ------13% ------18%
Walmart ------2%------ 3.5%
Yves Rocher------ 10.5% ------13.5%

These rate boosts are only good MONDAY 1/21 & TUESDAY 1/22. You must mention in the confirmation email you sent us that you are getting the rate boost. If this promotion will be a great success and we receive positive feedback we will make sure these promotions repeat more often.

***Please note we didn’t do a boost on Disney , Best Buy, HomeDepot, Kohl’s, Newegg or Barnes Nobles because there isn’t much of a boost that we can give you on it this month to make the promotion sound good.

Which shopping store would you like to see a rate boost for?

2007 Cyber Monday Holiday promotion is back even though it's not even the holidays!

On Monday 1/21 and Tuesday 1/22 we will increase the cash back rate for 10 shopping sites. Rate boost can be as much as double the current rate . Which stores should we increase the rate for? It is up to YOU.

Simply post a comment on this blog with the store(s) you would like a rate boost for. At the end of the week the top 10 stores with the most requests will have their rate boosted.

Why stuff does not credit & what can I do to make sure stuff credits.

Some members email us constantly saying that their offer(s) don’t credit. Even though this only applies to about 2% of our database I still decided to create this guide to help everyone out who has crediting issues.

How come stuff does not always credit?

98% of the offers in QuickRewards do credit. Sometimes the instant creditor gets jammed, but if it does that then it always catches up on what it didn't upload. If there was a crediting issue the advertiser never uploaded your transaction into their report and therefore the instant creditor has nothing to pick up. If you don't see credit that does not mean that it is the instant creditor's fault. I would say that 2:100 members are only having a crediting issue. If we see that specific offer(s) don’t credit for a majority we remove them from the site. Nothing is ever perfect and nothing tracks 100%. If 1 or 2 out of 10 offers don’t credit this isn’t a big issue. Crediting depends on a lot of things and one of the issues in the rewards program industry is that there are many competitors that have the same offers so if you are jumping from one site to another or if your security settings are too high these are the most common reasons why things don’t credit. In addition to that it can be that your computer firewall or software is blocking the cookies or your security is too high. There is no rewards program in existence where 100% of the things credit.

What does QuickRewards do when things don’t credit?

QuickRewards has one of the friendliest policies regarding manual credits. If things don’t credit that means QuickRewards never got paid for the transaction from the advertiser because your transaction never tracked. If shopping does not credit we can always email the advertisers and request manual credit. If freebie offers don’t credit we can’t email anyone since they will never pay for “freebie” offer that are missing, but we can give a courtesy manual credit at our expense(not many sites do that). Of course we can’t afford to keep paying a specific member manually credits if they constantly have errors either. If a trial offer does not credit we try to email the advertiser. If the advertisers don’t respond we always refund the amount you spent on the trial.

Here is a little guide on what you can do to get things to credit:

BROWSER SETTINGS:

1) I highly suggest that you use Firefox over Internet Explorer. It has better results and more secure.
2) Make sure you have the following settings:

Internet Explorer (click on TOOLS on top -> Internet Options -> Privacy (top tab) -> Advanced)

Make sure that always allow session cookies and override cookies box is checked. Also make sure that first and third party cookies are set to allow.
Also you have to make sure that your security settings is not set to high. To do that go to TOOLS -> Internet Options -> Security tab on top -> custom level and make sure on the button it says medium or low.

Firefox (click on TOOLS on top -> Options -> Privacy tab on top)
Make sure everything is checked except for always clear my private data after I close Firefox (unless you want this checked).

3) It is VERY important to clear cookies before doing larger offers or shopping. This way if you use multiple rewards programs or if you use coupon sites to locate coupons they will not get credited for these transactions and you/QR will. You should clear cookies occasionally before using our link or more frequently if you are doing large shopping orders or larger offers. Here is how to clear cookies:

Internet Explorer:
Tools on top -> Internet Options -> Delete cookies

Firefox:

Tools -> Clear private data -> Check cookies box and click on clear private data

Does the email you use to do offers matter?

The email you use to do offers can also play an essential role in if something credits or not. I don’t know why, but lately I seen a lot less offers crediting for those who use Yahoo. I suggest you get a gmail account(GOOGLE). This seems to be the best email system to use not only because it credits best, but because they give you a lot of space. You can get a free account by visiting this link:

gmail.google.com

If none of the two suggestions work please try the following:

1)Firewall/Popup blockers:

Try to disable them, do one offer and enable them back. See if that offer credits. Sometimes firewalls/popup blockers block cookies

2)Downlaod CCleaner.

I heard a lot of members have less problems after downloading it.
“CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! :)”
http://www.ccleaner.com/

3) Do you have Spyware Search and Destroy?

Make sure immunization settings are off. This causing crediting issues too because it blocks cookies

SHOPPING:

If an order does not credit 99% of the time it does not credit because you use a code/coupon not supplied by QR. Email us first to double check if you can use that coupon.

I hope this guide helps out a lot of members. If you have any questions feel free to post them here. If you have other suggestions on what members can do to avoid crediting issues please leave a comment!

Wacky QuickyPot promotion is back with more prizes

Do you remember the popular Wacky QuickyPot promotion we had last year where we selected 10 offers and the QuickyPot for each offer grew every time member did an offer and then that pot was split among everyone? Well it’s back and better then before!

We will once again have 10 offers (At least 5/10 will be new. 7/10 freebie offers and 3/10 trial/shopping) and this time instead of having one out of the new offers being the secret bonus pot 3 of them will be! That’s right 3/10 QuickyPot offers will not only give you the fraction of the pot, additional bonus. 2 freebie offers will each have a 5,000 token bonus and 1 of the trial/shopping offers will have 100,000 token bonus (bigger bonus since a lot less members will do these).

This promotion begins Wed morning and ends Friday 18th 11:59pm EST.
Let us know if you have any questions.