The RRC Editor’s Blog

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.