ei42 Newsletter Monday 17 November 2008

Consolidation by Retailers
In these uncertain times it is not surprising that many retailers are consolidating their positions in many areas. The way Ei42 works with these retailers is not entirely unaffected by these changes however we are all in a unique position in as much as there is always safety in numbers and there are now a lot of us!

One change is that whereas in the past retailers often worked with multiple agencies. we are now seeing many of them cease their relationship with the multi agency approach and focus their efforts into a single agency. As we at Ei42 have strong relationships with all of the major agencies this does not present us with a problem and to you as an end user the reality is that you simply will not even notice this happening.

Pending to Approved
One of the major changes of the past couple of months has been in the way sales and commissions are structured through the payment process. Historically, depending on which agency the retailers were working with would mean that each one had a different timescale for the timeframe from purchase through to pending and then approved commission. Whilst this has not been entirely rectified, as there will always be some exceptions, we now have something much closer to an easy to understand process. Generally speaking this is what now happens when you make a purchase;

You click a link on your Ei42 shop and make a purchase from any of the 1500 retailers and usually within 72 hours a commission will appear in your account with a status of ‘pending’ (some such as insurance/finance can take much longer)

An order placed in any calendar month will remain pending for the whole of that month. During the first 10 days of the month after the purchase was made the retailer will do one of 3 things with your commission.

Approve
Reject
Leave as Pending

If the status is changed to approved then that amount of money will be moved from pending to your approved commissions. If rejected you will see that commission as a reversal in your account. Rejections/Reversals can happen for a number of reasons for example you may have returned an item or cancelled an item ,in which case a rejection will be seen in your account. When a retailer leaves a commission in the status of pending it does not mean that it will not be approved. It simply means that the retailer has not yet confirmed this commission. One common reason for that to happen is for example if you bought something on the 25th of the month and the item had a 14 day returns policy.

Next week I will have news on the release of further improvements that we have been working on for Ei42 and an update on what we have planned for 2009.

That’s all for this week.

I wish you continued success with Ei42
Best Regards
Steve Dawson
Managing Director