Frequently Asked Questions
| 1. | Why offer MyStoreRewards to your buyers? Nearly every grocery store, restaurant, airline, gas station, music store, hotel, department store, etc., offers a reward program to get buyers to buy more. Offer your own reward program and increase your sales and grow your profits. MyStoreRewards is actually two powerful tools in one. First, it is an elegantly simple buyer reward program that quickly and easily tracks and rewards your loyal buyers when they buy from you. Second, it is a completely automated and eBay compliant opt-in email program. Best of all – it is free for all sellers signing-up during eBay's Selling Manager Pro Project Echo beta program. MyStoreRewards has flawlessly processed millions and millions of eBay and PayPal transactions for sellers in 58 countries around the globe. We have been running MyStoreRewards on eBay for five years. MyStoreRewards received PayPal's Star Developer Award as the "Most Innovative Product of the Year" in 2006 and we have been certified eBay solution providers since 2004. We invite you to join!
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Note: A 1% cash-back offer is the default value; you can set it at whatever percent you wish after you sign-up This image is shown to your buyers before they buy. Since they will know they are getting cash-back, many will bid higher helping to actually increase your average-selling-prices! This simple image above starts the process by notifying your buyers they will get an invitation email to join your MyStoreRewards program when they purchase from you. Only one invitation email is sent, promptly, and looks like this: Once your buyer clicks to join your MyStoreRewards program we opt your buyer in to your email list. You own the buyer opt-in list. The buyer gets a cash-back reward on the total payment (including S&H) when they join your list. Next, MyStoreRewards helps you DRIVE repeat sales by automatically sending these opted-in buyers a periodic marketing email cross-promoting your other eBay items. Whenever the buyer makes a repeat purchase from you, they get another cash-back reward from you to thank them for their repeat purchases.. You choose how frequently to send periodic reminder emails. You can also choose whatever whole rebate percent you wish to give back to new buyers and what percent to give back on repeat sales. Finally, issuing rewards is easy for you. MyStoreRewards will automatically calculate and process every buyer's cash-back reward after they pay you and opt-in. Our systems will prepare a PayPal file for you to use to automatically issue any rewards to your buyers. You will get an email notifying you to download this file after it is processed. The short instructions in the email will tell you how to process it through your PayPal account. It takes about two minutes, but if you wish, you can also set-up your PayPal account to have our system automatically issue rewards after you review them. Note: Rebate rewards are sent only after your item is marked as paid on eBay. You can always review and/or stop any reward payment before it is issued. You can review past rebate rewards within your own PayPal account.
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| 3. | What does MyStoreRewards cost?
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| 4. | How do buyers get their rebate reward? Buyers who have joined your MyStoreRewards program will receive all rebate rewards through their PayPal account only after they pay you. They do NOT have
to pay with PayPal. If they do not have a PayPal account (very few!) we will invite them to open a PayPal account to receive their reward. Your buyer
always receives the FULL reward amount and do not pay any PayPal fees to receive their cash-back reward.
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| 5. | What is MyStoreRewards relationship with PayPal? Currently, we issue all rewards through PayPal. PayPal has over 100 million accounts and operates in over 70 countries. Nearly every eBay seller and almost
all eBay buyers now use PayPal. With so many accounts and with PayPal's integration on eBay, it made perfect sense for MyStoreRewards to develop our program
for use with the PayPal payments platform.
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| 6. | How does MyStoreRewards affect the fees I pay eBay or PayPal? MyStoreRewards operates independently of PayPal and eBay and every other market platform or auction software service you may use. As such, you are expected to pay whatever fees you agreed to in each service provider's user agreement.
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| 7. | How do I handle returns with MyStoreRewards? Before you issue a refund to a buyer who has returned an item, you should check to see if the buyer received a rebate reward from you. If so, simply refund the expected amount less the rebate reward. For example, if your buyer paid $100 for an item and received a $2.00 reward rebate from you, IF the buyer then returns the item asking for a refund, you should send the buyer only $98.00 to complete the refund. Your buyer is notified this will happen when they join your MyStoreRewards program.
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| 8. | How do I get started with my FREE MyStoreRewards program? Everything is automated for you. After you join, you can make changes to your default reward amounts at any time. You will incur NO fees for MyStoreRewards whatsoever during the Project Echo Beta trial. The cash-back rewards sent from you to your buyers is an expense you incur as the rewards will be issued from your PayPal account.
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| 9. | How should I set the cash-back reward amounts when I use MyStoreRewards?
By default, your reward rebates are initially set to give buyers a 1% reward when they join your program and to give a 2% reward on repeat sales. Rebate
rewards are calculated on the TOTAL payment your buyer makes (including any shipping and handling). However, you can change the MyStoreRewards rebate reward
percentages at any time to any percent you choose. You can also change the maximum reward amount you will give for any single reward payment. The default
maximum reward is set so you never pay more than 10.00 in the currency of the payment. You can change this.
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| 10. | Can I use MyStoreRewards work on my own web site sales and for my eBay account? For now, we are restricting the MyStoreRewards SM and SMP program participation to only eBay sales. However, MyStoreRewards was designed and does operate on any web- site. We will provide additional information for using MyStoreRewards off-eBay in the Summer of 2009.
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| 11. | What do you do with my information and my customer information?
What do you do with my information and my customer information?
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| 12. | What are my obligations if I sign-up?
When you use MyStoreRewards, you agree to let MyStoreRewards place our HTML code on all your eBay listings so it is visible prior to your buyer's purchase.
We will place it at the bottom of your listings automatically. If you have a template, you can choose to place the image directly into your template where
you deem appropriate.
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| 13. | MyStoreRewards issues rewards from my PayPal account, is that secure? Absolutely! To issue rewards, we simply prepare a file for you to process through your PayPal account. This file will show all pending/unpaid rewards. It is a ".txt" file, so you can review it easily before processing. Whenever a reward is pending, we'll let you know to come to our site and download this file to process through PayPal. It takes only two minutes to do so. For higher volume sellers, we offer an automated option where you can set-up your PayPal account to have rewards automatically issued. You will still get notifications of all pending rewards 48-hours before they are issued. MyStoreRewards will NEVER issue buyer rewards until you have had the chance to review any pending reward. You have 100% control of your reward process.A few more things you should know about how our system issues your buyer rewards:
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| 14. | Is there a maximum reward amount a buyer can earn? Yes. You set a maximum reward amount for your account. The default is 10.00 in the buyer's currency. For example, if you sell an item for $1,000 and offer a 5% reward, the most your buyer will receive is still only $10.00 (not $50.00). We explain this to your buyers in the rules of the program which they must agree to and we remind them of the limit in emails we send them. You can set the reward maximum at what you deem appropriate.
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| 15. | What does eBay or PayPal say about MyStoreRewards? MyStoreRewards has developed our service to meet or exceed all eBay and PayPal rules and policies that might affect your listings, or standing, as a registered eBay or PayPal user. We have reviewed MyStoreRewards with both PayPal and eBay and they are aware of how our service operates. We are a certified developer for both eBay and PayPal and we actively participate in eBay and PayPal's development community. PayPal awarded MyStoreRewards with the "Most Innovative Application of the Year" in 2006. We think they like us – we sure like them!
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| 16. | What do I need to do with my accounting systems when I use MyStoreRewards? Most of our sellers simply record any reward payment to their buyers as marketing expenses in their accounting system. Because MyStoreRewards does not need to interface with other systems, you can use MyStoreRewards with any accounting package or auction software listing package.
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| 17. | Do I need to make any changes to my systems to use MyStoreRewards? No. MyStoreRewards is a turn-key program. MyStoreRewards was designed to work within the eBay Selling Manager Pro system using eBay's Project Echo.
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| 18. | Does MyStoreRewards send SPAM emails? No. We do not send SPAM emails. Our service is white-listed with all the major email services and we meet all eBay guidelines on email marketing. Everything we do is legal and best-in-class for the internet. We make it our business to know the laws and policies that a marketing email program needs to follow, so you won't have to spend your valuable time learning those laws and policies. MyStoreRewards sends two types of emails to buyers, neither is SPAM. The first type is an invitation email tied to a specific eBay purchase transaction between a seller and a buyer. These emails do not include any commercial solicitations. The invitation email fulfills the promise the seller makes in the listing via the notification HTML to send an invitation email to all their buyers. The invitation email thanks the buyer and confirms the purchase and invites the buyer to join the seller's MyStoreRewards program. Within this reward invitation email, MyStoreRewards asks for your buyer's opt-in permission for MyStoreRewards to send the buyer future commercial emails. The second type of email is our periodic marketing emails we automatically send on your behalf. These ARE considered commercial emails (not spam) because they do promote a seller's then-active eBay listings to the opted-in buyer. While commercial in nature, these update emails are NOT SPAM because they are sent ONLY after a buyer opts-in to receive them from MyStoreRewards. If your buyer does not opt-in, your buyer does not receive a rebate reward, future emails or another invitation email. Buyers can opt-out at anytime. In fact, because we believe in giving buyers control of their email box, we make it very easy for them to opt-out. However, once opted-out, buyers no longer receive cash-back rewards on repeat purchases. Our opt-in permission process meets or exceeds all legal, eBay and PayPal standards for commercial email. For more information read our Seller Privacy Policy.
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| 19. | I sell most items under $10.00, is it worth offering MyStoreRewards to my buyers? When you create your MyStoreRewards account, you can set the buyer reward levels to whatever percentage you wish. If you sell mostly $10.00 items, you may want to set your reward level to 5% or 10%. That way your buyers will get $0.50 or $1.00 for joining your MyStoreRewards program.
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| 20. | For some of my sales, a buyer may only get a $0.50 reward. Is that worth it to the buyer? One thing we have learned in all our years of running reward programs is this: No one gets upset when you give them money. In fact, try this experiment when you are out in public today. Take a quarter out of your pocket and drop it on the ground. Then sit back and watch if anyone walks past the quarter without picking it up. Let us know if more than three people do so, because we've never seen a quarter sit on the ground that long before someone picks it up. While that is a fun experiment to try, we really do suggest you experiment with your own reward levels. Setting different reward levels is incredibly easy on MyStoreRewards. It takes about 10 seconds. Because your buyers will be different from another seller's, we strongly advise that you test different reward levels to see what works best for your business.
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| 21. | What sort of results can I expect from the MyStoreRewards program? You will see your sales and profits increase when you use MyStoreRewards. But don't take our word for it. We track your results and show you what repeat sales we drive for you! We make it very easy for you to see your results. We show your statistics right when you log-in and we send you a monthly email report of all information. You'll see how many buyers are in your program, how much those buyers have spent with you and how much you have paid out in rewards. You will also see the repeat purchase counts and average purchase amounts. You'll soon see we increase your business in several ways: First, we get much higher opt-in rates for you than you would ever get on your own. Our history tells us that we get about ten times (yes, that is TEN times) the opt-in rates under our programs than a typical seller might get asking a buyer to opt-in to an email list. To put it bluntly: Many more of your buyers will join your email list under our service than virtually any other email service you can run yourself or find on the internet - because they receive a reward when they do! What's more, you will find your buyers will respond to the emails we send suggesting they return to purchase from you. Compared to industry standards, we generally see double the response rates to emails we send under our program. The addition of a reward offer in an email is a very strong incentive for your buyers to return and buy again. Remember, you also can set the frequency of your emails so you adjust your email campaign to best fit your strategy.
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| 22. | How does MyStoreRewards issue rewards from my PayPal account? By default, we simply process a rewards file for you. You will download the file and then process it through PayPal in about two minutes. If you would like, or if you are a high-volume seller, you can set-up your account to process the rewards automatically. We do this using the PayPal MassPay function. Any day you have a reward pending, we will send you email instructions telling you to download your processed file and giving you simple instructions on how to process the file through your PayPal account.
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| 23. | How do I get help with MyStoreRewards? We offer easy-to-use forms during registration, and our processes are simple for you to use. We also offer these extensive FAQ's to answer most issues. Lastly, you can send us any question via email to CustomerService@MyStoreRewards.com and we will respond promptly.
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| 24. | Can I see a sample of the update email that is sent to buyers? Yes, please click here for a sample of an invitation email and click here for a sample of the periodic reminder email we send to your opted-in buyers.
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| 25. | Can I unsubscribe at any time? Yes. To cancel, or unsubscribe, to MyStoreRewards simply go to your Selling Manager Pro application tab in your "My eBay" section of eBay. Scroll down to the box containing "MyStoreRewards." On the right of the box is a link labeled: "Other Actions." Click that link and then click the "unsubscribe" option and you are all done. Please note, when you unsubscribe we cannot delete the MyStoreRewards image from your listings. We will delete the award percent only. eBay does not have an automated method for us to delete text in a listing.
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| 26. | When you send my buyers a reminder email, what items are being cross-sold in that email? Since you sell on eBay, we have worked with eBay to develop an intelligent cross-selling function in our system. We will look at the last item your buyer purchased and do a key-word and category match to that item. We have found that buyers are far more likely to buy similar items or items in similar categories, so we intelligently select those items to cross-sell in the marketing email. Alternatively, you can create a custom email campaign to cross-sell the items you choose to promote to your buyers. Creating custom campaigns is easy and gives you greater flexibility in promoting "hot" items or sending higher-priced items to bigger spenders. In either case, you should consider our reminder emails as your powerful marketing communications tool with your buyer. We track buyer response to the reminder emails so you know how many buyers open the emails, how many click through to items promoted in your emails and how many buyers purchase within 72 hours of getting one of your reminder emails. That information is sent to you each month in an email report.
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| 27. | How do I get started with custom campaigns? You start by segmenting your buyers into different groups. You can then send different reward offers to the different groups of buyers. For instance, you can send all buyers who have spent, say $500 with you in the last year, one reward offer. Or, you could set up a custom campaign so any buyer who hasn't purchased from you in 90-days receives a different reward. You can also create a special season sale offer for Mother's Day or Christmas by giving a special bonus of 10% back on all purchases during the sale. Hopefully, you get the picture. The custom campaign tool is very powerful, but very simple to use.
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| 28. | How do my international buyers get their reward? We issue your buyer rewards via PayPal in the same currency as the buyer paid. If you are a US seller and have a Canadian buyer, that buyer may pay for your item in Canadian dollars, yet PayPal automatically exchanges the currency back into US dollars to pay you. This works well for both parties because, as far as you both know, you are only operating in your own currency. However, when we issue cash-back rewards, we make the reward payment in the buyer's original currency. To properly issue the reward to your buyer, you will need to have that foreign currency balance in your PayPal account. Please ensure that your PayPal account has the required currency balance available before processing your rewards file you download. The steps to add foreign currency balances to your PayPal account are below:
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