ei42 newsletter Monday 26 January 2009

Fraud Information
Over the last couple of weeks we have experienced a sharp increase in attempted fraud activity on Ei42. This is where certain members  have attempted to abuse the goodwill of Ei42 and the retailers that we work with by attempting to earn rebates & commissions that are not justifiable.
Generally speaking this is impossible because you only receive a rebate if you actually buy something, but there are some exceptions. For example,  requesting more than one brochure from Kitchens Direct on a single account, requesting 100's of free orange sim cards, ordering multiple insurance company brochures with no intention of ever buying anything.
The result of any member attempting to fraud the retailers working with Ei42 in this way reflects badly on us all. Retailers, such as Kitchen Direct do not have a problem with speculating that an adult in theUK ordering a brochure may have only a passing interest in ordering a new kitchen today, as long as they have 'some' genuine interest then they could well be a purchaser tomorrow and that is what business is all about.
What they nor Ei42 will tolerate is direct and blatant abuse. In reality what happens anyway is that a lot of pending commissions are simply rejected which in turn makes the honest and genuine majority think that something is going wrong with Ei42 when it is not.
As a result of the above abuse of our systems and goodwill, Ei42 today terminated the accounts of 56 members who we had identified as having been acting fraudulently. As a result some members (not all) will see a decrease (small or large) in the number of people in their team as displayed in the admin area.
Amazon
Amazon have today (26th January 2009) contacted a number of websites including Ei42 with the following statement.
Amazons Statement:

In order to keep the Associates Program viable for the long-term, we've concluded that we cannot continue our Association with rebate-oriented sites, and your account has therefore been closed:
Short Notice or what?
Yes we thought so too, but unfortunately there is absolutely nothing we can do about it and of course we are not alone. Ei42 apologise for any inconvenience this may cause but as you can see from the statement and lack of notice we are left with no alternative other than to remove this link. There are many other merchants on Ei42 that do offer and will continue to offer rebates to our growing membership for exactly the same products as you will find on Amazon and probably at better prices.
For those of you who run Ei42 as a business opportunity, I would like you to know that while I personally am very dissapointed that we have lost Amazon from Ei42, in reality it accounted for a very small percentage of revenue and rebates generated from Ei42 due to the very low commissions.
New This Week
In your admin area you will now see additional information in the financials area which now shows a section for 'Income Split (all time) Paid'.
Legal Stuff
For legal reasons we have been advised to remove the income and team building estimators from Ei42.com and from your admin areas. I'm pretty confident that you all have a calculator so I'm sure you will be more than capable of working out your own estimates on the power of Ei42.
Happy Birthday Ei42
It's hard to believe but this time next week Ei42 will be One Year Old. Having launched on 1st February 2008 our first year has been incredible and we have so many great plans for 2009 you'll definately want to stick around.

That’s all for this week.

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