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Due to Google blocking access to this blog right after only my second posting earlier in the week (their autobots decided this was a "spam blog"-- which it clearly is NOT), we've moved SFI INSIGHTS to our own servers. I apologize for the inconvenience. Please visit SFI INSIGHTS now at:

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Solving The International Shipping Challenge

For many years now, we've been trying to solve the shipping cost issue for our international (primarily non-North American) affiliates.

There's just no getting around the fact that if you live in, say Australia, the shipping cost is going to be expensive to receive a bottle of, say SFI's Advanced Liquid Nutrition, because it must come all the way from our warehouse in Lincoln, Nebraska USA.

And for the record, we charge for shipping and handling ONLY what WE get charged by the carrier. Not a penny less or more.

THE SOLUTION

We believe the solution will come with the launch of our coming commercial sellers program at TripleClicks (TC). Participants in this new program will be known as "E-Commerce Associates" or ECAs.

The ECA program will work like this:

Any company can apply to participate in the program (there will be a simple online application).

To participate, the company must be willing to provide SFI with wholesale prices on any products they wish to sell at TC (we're not going to allow them to receive the free traffic we generate and market their products side by side with our products unless they're willing to make it worth our while of course).

There are other requirements as well (more on this in a moment).

Once an ECA has been accepted, they will be provided with a special account where they can immediately begin entering basically unlimited product listings. From this form, they'll be able to enter a product name and description, weight, specifications, price, etc., upload product photos, and choose the appropriate department(s) for the product. There is no cost to the ECA to list their products on TC.

Once entered and approved by SFI, the listings will immediately appear in TC alongside all the other products in that department. They will also be searchable by name, keyword, SVP, CV, etc.

Note that an order at TC always uses ONE shopping cart. A shopping cart may contain "TC Direct" products (such as Advanced Liquid Nutrition) and/or Private Seller items and/or ECA items. And all payment processing will be done by TC.

Because of how the TC shopping cart and payment system operates, ECAs will be required to take and ship orders prior to receiving payment from us.

Example: We take an order for a widget sold by XYZ Company on September 1st. Upon processing payment, we forward the order via e-mail to XYZ Company (this would normally be within minutes of receipt of the order). On September 15th, we send payment to XYZ Company for this order (including the shipping costs) and any other orders that we processed between September 1st and September 15th.

Note that our payment schedule will likely be based on volume. If we're only processing a small handful of orders for your company each month, payment will likely be monthly. Conversely, if we're seeing multiple daily orders for example, we may very well be willing to pay you daily.

So, in short, the basic requirement for ECAs will be:

1. Wholesale prices offered to SFI

2. Acceptance of orders via daily electronic transmission

3. Orders shipped promptly and directly to customers with payment from us coming in arrears

These are very reasonable requirements in my opinion. And in return, some sizable and growing benefits will be there's to enjoy. TC is already a top 25,000 website worldwide and we've only just begun. 99% of TC programs, products, and features are still to come. Traffic will, no doubt, increase exponentially over the years to come.

So having your products in TC will allow you to easily have your products exposed to a large and diverse worldwide audience (and many thousands of affiliates looking for products to buy from their countries).

And there you go! With that last sentence, do you see the solution coming into focus?

That is, once the ECA program is launched, excellently-priced products and services of hundreds, if not thousands, of companies from your country can all be available to you from within TC (and with sizable CV and SVP to make earning EA status easier than ever before)!

EVEN BETTER

So what would be even better than having access to thousands of products direct from your homeland? How about also earning a royalty on EVERY product sold at TC by every company that you refer to TC? Yes, this and perhaps group royalty overrides, too, are being considered.

Referring an ECA would be as simple as referring them to an SFI Gateway as you do now. Full information and the application form will be provided at the Gateway. All you have to do is get them to the Gateway. For any referrals you generate, you're looking at receiving royalties on EVERY sale from your referred company WORLDWIDE...for LIFE! It doesn't get any better than that, folks!

WHEN? WHERE? HOW?!

Launch of this program is still months away, but I'd encourage you to start preparing now. Start lining up companies in your country (and/or worldwide) you think would be good prospects for the ECA program so that when we do launch, you'll be ready to hit the ground running. A good idea is to also get the name of the company's owner or marketing director as they will likely be the decision makers. You might start talking to them now, give them the preliminary details, and get their permission now to let them know when the program launches.

Who would be good prospects for the ECA program? Initially at least, I would not recommend pursuing major companies. For a variety of reasons, they're probably not going to see significant value in participating, at least in the beginning. Instead, look for companies that are young and hungry to grow. Size-wise, small to mid-sized companies are probably your best bets. You'll have a much easier time getting through to the decision makers and they likely won't have layers and layers of management to stall action.

There are of course companies to avoid, too. Grocery stores or similar stores that do not ship products to customers are probably not viable candidates. We will also not accept companies that sell adult or controversial products.

Note: As always, we have a zero tolerance policy on spamming so make sure you factor this in. For example, preparing a list of companies should include full postal addresses and/or phone numbers so that you can use postal mail or the telephone, not e-mail, to contact prospective companies about becoming ECAs.

Tip: Companies and businesses that are not yet selling on the Internet are great prospects too. This is because with our ECA program, we'll be giving them a way to jump on the Internet with all the heavy lifting done for them. If they can receive email, they can participate because we're going to provide the audience for them, take the order for them, and handle all the payment processing. All they have to do is ship the orders that we forward to them to the customer. That's it.

ONE MORE THING...A NEW FEATURE DEBUTS

In the meantime, it would sure be nice if you could easily locate products in TC that DO ship from your country NOW, wouldn't it?! Well, you'll be pleased to know that, as of today, we have added this feature to the Advanced Search at TC.

Note that it will, of course, only deliver results for listings that indeed ship from your country. If you live in a country that has no MaxMalls Merchants or no Private Seller Listings yet, it will return no results. OF COURSE, THAT'S WHAT THE NEW ECA PROGRAM IS DESIGNED TO SOLVE! So, if you're not seeing results on a search of your country yet–hang in there–it's coming! As well as many other exciting additions and features to YOUR STORE, TripleClicks!

That's it for now. I welcome your comments.

Gery Carson

P.S. If you're not an SFI affiliate and would like to join the fun, there are several thousand affiliates around the world who would love to sponsor you. ;-) Google us!

MaxMalls Integration

Starting last week, we have begun integrating our MaxMalls.com Merchants (MMM) into TripleClicks.com (TC). Some of the first ones you'll see are represented by eight new departments at TC (Beauty & Fragrance, Education, Financial Services, Live Entertainment, Real Estate, Romance, Phone & Tech Services, and Travel).

Additional MMMs will be showing up soon within our other existing TC departments.

Why integrate? With MaxMalls integrated into TripleClicks…

A. ALL of our e-commerce offerings are centralized in ONE store. Just one store to promote and build around.

B. With our heavy emphasis and steadily-growing traffic at TC, we will no doubt generate more sales for our MMMs. And since 100% of MMM revenues go straight into the Executive Bonus pool, that means potentially much larger Executive Bonuses.

C. The addition of MMMs means a greatly broadened TC. Instead of just over 10,000 products (currently anyway), TC can soon trumpet the availability of over a MILLION products and services and, truly, something for everyone!

Questions & Answers:

Q: So if I refer someone to TC and they end up making a purchase at one of the MMMs, will I earn a commission?

A: Not directly, no. As has always been the case with MaxMalls, all MaxMalls revenues go into the Executive Bonus pool and are split up equally amongst all EAs. So long as you are an EA (Executive Affiliate), you'll receive one equal share in the form of an Executive Bonus.

Q: Why not just track MMM sales to me directly and pay me directly instead of having a pool?

A: We'd actually prefer to do that. And we've tried this, more than once, in past years. But it's simply not practical. For starters, individual tracking with hundreds of different merchants is very difficult to do accurately and has very complex reporting requirements. Each merchant also has its own policies on when it pays. Some pay weekly. Some monthly. Some quarterly. Some don't pay until certain amounts are reached. And so on.

Hence, we are constantly dealing with affiliates saying, "Hey, I placed an order (or I know someone who placed an order) with such and such store, so where's my commission?" And our Affiliate Support Team members winds up spending all its time tracking down these queries. More than 99% of the time, there's no problem, the order was successfully recorded and a commission is forthcoming. It's just that every merchant has different policies on when they pay out. And we can't pay you until we get paid by the merchant.

The bottom line is that we just cannot be spending all our time tracking down queries of this kind. It's completely counter-productive and takes us away from the areas where assistance is truly needed. It's SOOOOOOO much easier to simply put all the revenues received from MMMs into a pool and pay it out in shares to qualified affiliates each month. Clean and simple!

Q: That doesn't seem fair to me. If I refer someone to TC and they end up making a purchase at an MMM, it should be ME and me only that earns that commission.

A: That's one way to look at it. But please consider this: We have many THOUSANDS of affiliates referring prospects to TC every day. Some may refer many more than you and be responsible for generating many more sales from MMMs than you. Using a pool, you actually will receive MORE income than if we were able to track individual sales back to you and pay you directly. Not only that, but you'll get paid a share of the pool whether or not you generate ANY MMM sales. So it works both ways.

Q: Is there SVP associated with sales from MMMs?

A: No, for the same reason as above. Individual tracking is just not practical because we have to rely on the various merchants and they do not provide the information we need in a way we can utilize it for awarding SVP in a timely fashion.

Q: Timely fashiion?

A: Yes, imagine we were able to attach SVP to MMM orders and you generated a big order worth 10 SVP to qualify you for EA status this month. Because this merchant's reporting is inadequate and/or they pay us only quarterly, we can't award you the SVP until they let us know of the order and/or pay us...and so you lose your EA status, lose your larger EA commissions, etc. It just doesn't work. We must use a pool to make it work.

Q: So MaxMalls will ALWAYS be a pool then?

A: No. If a practical method of tracking sales individually comes along, we'll be glad to consider changing.

Q: You don't have very many MaxMalls merchants from my country. Why not?

A: We're open to adding many more merchants from all over the world, but in order for them to participate they MUST have an affiliate program. That is, they must be able to track any orders that SFI generates and they must pay us commissions on those sales. Not every e-commerce site on the Internet has this. If you know of a good e-commerce site in your country that you'd like to see at TC that DOES, let us know via our Suggestion Box at the Affiliate Center. Special Note: They may be even better prospects for our coming E-Commerce Associates program, which WILL have individual tracking, SVP, etc. Be watching for information on the E-Commerce Associate program SOON.