"Jay W." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> continues: > for the sake of argument, lets see where the need would > come from - i want to pay someone, but i don't know > their email address.
You don't *know* it, or there's extra work involved to get it; I'll explain in a second. > also this someone does not have a > web page set up to accept the payment. so when i pay > them, they won't know i've paid them. One doesn't necessarily need a web page to need money. ;-) Actually, I shouldn't even put the emoticon there; it's a very true thing that you can get an idea into the heads of more people by not requiring them to have a website. You need not look any further than at the viral-marketing success of Hotmail. Also, I'm living proof that it's hard work for many people to add interactivity to their website when they do have one; we've had over a quarter million Webmasters sign up for the Free Feedback Form service provided by our own Freedback.com . > when does this situation arise? that answer will help us > prioritize the feature for addition. I can think of at least three cases; all have "simplification" (or perhaps, "transactional lubricant") as a common denominator. 1. Clearly it is preferable to have a registration process for affiliates in a website affiliate program, but this isn't actually necessary. (You recognize this by incorporating your own affiliate program right into the e-gold system, which makes things much easier.) There are plenty of cases where we could squeeze a few more grams out of referral relationships if the affiliates didn't feel a need to sign up. For example, I might mention a particular book in my personal journal, (URL below), and I'll link to that book on Amazon, but I don't want to have to bother signing up for their affiliate program because I know that it might result in only one or two sales. (That doesn't even put me *near* the minimum-monthly-check threshold, so I'll never see the money, anyway.) On the other hand, if I know that all I have to do to earn a few instant milligrams from a low-volume referral is to use an URL like, http://Example.com/?EG427324 I am much more likely to add that to the end of an URL. i.e., My identity, outside of the numbered account, is superfluous. :-) And yes, I have a gold-oriented website coming up, where I intend to use this approach as the exclusive affiliate program. I *like* the idea of a 0g threshold, because it means that I'll be brightening the day of a lot more affiliates. Has anyone considered how much money Microsoft made simply by closing down ClickTrade and keeping all the micropayments from the hundreds of thousands of affiliate accounts which never reached the monthly minimum? (As a former ClickTrade advertiser, I can assure you that we still had to *pay* the "bank" for each of these, despite the money never getting to the affiliate.) 2. Auction sites like eBay have been pushing in the direction of centralizing communication, rather than using peer-to-peer. Yes, I *can* get a counterparty's email address by requesting it, and waiting, but eBay makes it much easier for me to "checkout" by going through their scripts. Similarly, PayPal has a rather robust interface to facilitate their "You've got cash!" emails, which means that I never *have* to send an email outside of the one that they send. In order for e-gold to grow, it needs to offer a similar level of user-friendliness. Ironically, as I was writing that paragraph, I was talking to one of our customer service reps about a client who had sent all of their transaction details in the PayPal email, rather than through our own credit-card interface. 3. There are small transactions where the recipient wants to know that they got their gold, but it isn't worth going to the site to confirm this, nor does the sender have much motivation to take the additional time to write an email. A perfect example of this is when I give my children their weekly allowance. Yes, they could check their accounts, but usually, it's enough for them to know that they got their gold, and then they get right back to their own lives. Of course, the ideal would be if *they* could each set up a periodic emailed invoice (via the e-gold site) to remind me to pay them; right now, I've had to set up an internal weekly cron job to serve this function. If anyone's curious, I pay each kid 30mg/year-of-age per week. If you don't have kids, think, "friend's pizza/beer money" instead of "allowance". > we should also discuss what kind of information might be > in the email. because email is easily spoofed, we don't want > anyone getting in the habit of thinking that because > a text message arrived in their inbox, they actually own > more bits of gold - so i'd assume the email is something > like 'check your e-gold account, a new transaction has been posted'. I disagree. Yes, spoofs and fraud will occur, but they will, anyway, so why *force* me to go to the e-gold website? For a few mg, I'm not going to bother; for a sizeable chunk of a kg, I'll probably take the extra time. :-) So yeah, my vote is to disclose *all* information from the given transaction. It's not an absolute, but you can remind recipients to check the bottom-most (earliest) "Received: " line in the headers, as well as a general disclaimer that the emails are provided for convenience only; the website is the court of last resort, yadda, yadda, yadda. One more point: Since all of our other online business relationships eventually produce an email record of all transactions, it becomes very convenient to use our email programs as a way of organizing all of our cashflow. Yes, if everything we did were to involve e-gold, we could use the e-gold history screen to do this, but that's simply not always going to be the case. -- David Beroff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Founder/CEO, LeadFactory.com P.O. Box 234, Jenkintown, PA 19046-0234 (USA) http://LeadFactory.com Voice: +1 (215) 576-6800 Fax: +1 (215) 576-6853 ICQ: 3652887 Toll-free: 1.800.668.3163 Home page: http://David.Beroff.com --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses.
