The RRC Editor’s Blog

The main purpose of Rebate Report Card is to help consumers figure out which rebates are actually a good deal. If you see a rebate for $100 from a company that takes forever to send out the checks and often refuses to pay at all, well, maybe that’s not such a good deal after all. Maybe it would be best to rule out that rebate in your cost calculations.

Currently, the best way to evaluate a rebate offer is to go to the Rebate Report Card search page and put in the name of the store or manufacturer offering the rebate. If the search results are too large, you can narrow down the search by selecting the product category or by choosing to only see how many “A” grades there are, etc.

Sometimes it’s hard to make sense of all that information though. After all, the fact that Company X got a lot of “D” grades might not be such a bad thing, if the average on the website is an “F”. We all know the reports on this site will tend to be slanted toward the negative, just because human psychology doesn’t drive us to report “normal” or “good” experiences as much as the frustrating ones.

So, in the near future, I’ll be improving the site to make it easier to see how any particular company stacks up to the rest of the companies that we know about. I might do this by grading on a curve, or maybe I’ll create some sort of “index” number to show alongside the grades. In any case, it’ll be simple and easy to understand.

If you have other suggestions, please post them over on the message board. Or, use the contact page to send me an idea.

You can expect to see the improved rating system by the end of the year. It would have been nice to get it in before the holiday shopping season, but I’ve been pretty busy applying to law schools lately. I’ll let you know how that goes too.

Please look at our “Mesage Board” for further updates on what’s going on with the site. I’m going to reserve this blog for things like deep thoughts on the state of the rebate business, or research into the psychology and marketing of rebates, etc.

In the “Mesage Board,” you will find a “Site News” category. That’s the place to look to see what’s up behind the scenes at RebateReportCard.com. While you’re there, post a message in one of the other categories. Get a conversation started and help build this website. Thanks for being here!

Today I sent out the first e-mail to announce the presence of this web site to a select group of people, so that they might help me test this thing. This first group is pretty elite. Basically just friends and family.

If all goes well, I’ll fix whatever bugs they help me find and we’ll get this thing launched to the general public in a week or so.

Innovative Techniques Make It Easy to Rate the Rebates

Let’s face it. This web site is about a potentially nerve-wracking subject — mail-in rebates (and sometimes other forms of rebates). Given the stressful nature of the website’s main topic, we’re doing all we can to make the site itself as simple and easy to use as possible.

We focus on simplicity and usability in everything on the site, from the way you find rebate ratings to the way you enter them to the way you dig up news about rebate providers.

If you look closely at the way you enter rebate ratings, right away you’ll see an example of an innovative technique that makes everything go more smoothly. The first thing you have to do is enter the name of the company that offered the rebate that you’re rating (or “grading”).

Now, on some web sites, you’d expect to see a long, long, long list of every company known to mankind. You’d have to scroll through a couple hundred company names in the hope that the one you wanted was in there. Would it be spelled the way you expected? Would it be “HP/Compaq” (Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have merged) or just “Compaq?” What if it were not there? It could become as much of a hassle as the rebate itself. And that would be a nightmare.

But, on Rebate Report Card, you just type in whatever name you want, however you want. We’re hoping you’ll keep it simple and spell it right. But, if you don’t, so be it. It’s your report. You do it however you want. We’ll figure out the details.

If you’re one of those skeptical types, you might be asking “what if we all type ‘HP’ in different ways?” Aha! That’s where the real genius comes in. Rebate Report Card has some unique, innovative logic at work behind the scenes to help smooth out the rough edges. The logic in our programming code will attempt to figure out what you mean.

So, by the time you go and look at what you posted, the exact company name you see might be a little different than the way you typed it in. That way, two or three different people can type the company name in different ways, but all their entries will show one company name — and the summary of all those reports will be easy to read and understand. Plus, when we add up the ratings (or grades) for HP, we can include all the “Hewlett-Packard” entries and the “Compaq” entries and the “HP” entries, etc., in one big total. Pretty cool, don’t you think?

How do we do all this? Well… We can’t reveal all our tricks. This sort of innovation takes valuable skill and knowledge. Maybe after it’s thoroughly tested and perfected we’ll sell the rights to Bill Gates or Google or Yahoo! (We’ll keep you posted on any offers.)

It’s all new innovation, and it might take a little while to get the logic working just the way we want, but we think it’ll go a long way toward ensuring that sharing your knowledge with the world and helping other consumers is an easy and rewarding experience. And that’s what this web site is all about.

You’ll see something called “News Feeds,” if you look over there at the menus running down the left side of most of the pages on this web site (hopefully including the page you’re looking at right now).

The editor and publisher of Rebate Report Card (RRC) has been rounding up, and creating from scratch, some informative news feeds to incorporate into this web site. So, if you click on that link over there (not right now, or you won’t get to the end of this sentence), you’ll see constantly updated news about efforts to reform the rebate business, problems with rebates, how to find good rebates, companies that are dropping rebates altogether, and whatnot.

Basically, if you are hankering for news about anything rebate-related — perhaps because you’re still steaming over how much of a hassle rebates have become and you want to know what’s being done about it — now you know where to look.

Even before the official launch of the site, you can voice your opinion on various problems with mail-in rebates. Just go to this web site’s home page and look at the right side of the page. You’ll usually see one or two polls there where you can enter your opinion. Or, you can just click the “Results” link to see what others have said.

After the main features have been added to this web site, you’ll find a much more powerful and influential way to let your voice be heard. But, we’ll save the details about that for later.

For far too long consumers have had to deal with rebate offers that had little or no value. We all have the same thought when we see that $100 rebate on a new computer, television, or DVD player… “Would I ever see that money if I bought the thing?”

Well, this very web site — the one you’re visiting right now — will soon offer a way for consumers to make a more educated guess about how long it might take to actually get that rebate money if they bought the item in question. In fact, they might find out that they are not likely to get the rebate at all for some products. And, they may be encouraged to learn that they will be very likely to get a quick, full rebate for other products.

How will all this work? You’ll just have to come back here over the course of the next few days and weeks to see how it all evolves. Watch this journal for more details and look at the home page to see the features begin to take shape.

Until then, thanks for visiting.

Rebate Report Card will include a top-of-the-line bulletin board, which will be a nice place for consumers to carry on discussions of any rebate-related topic.

The bulletin board is already installed on the site. It just needs a little style adjustment and some content preparation before it’s ready for prime time. Of course, it’s release will probably be timed to coincide with the major features of the site anyway. The code behind the bulletin board, for those of you who are into that sort of thing, is the very popular and highly acclaimed phpBB. We provide only the best for visitors to Rebate Report Card.

Speaking of which… This blog is a WordPress blog, another highly regarded and very popular product on the Web. Quality counts at Rebate Report Card.

You can expect similar quality from the features we’re building ourselves, which will provide the valuable rebate analysis capability that you need in order to make sound purchasing decisions. Stay tuned.