Digital-Neighbors Buy.com and Amazon deal update

[TEAMHOZIE]

I received this email today.


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March 7, 2001

To: Digital Neighbors Members

From: Tim Timmermann, Owner & Webmaster of Digital-Neighbors

An open letter to everyone waiting for Amazon.com and Buy.com certificates.

First of all, I want to insist that everyone who has signed up for the Digital-Neighbors certificate programs WILL get what they have been promised. Allow me to explain the nature of our situation and hopefully this will clear up what is going on with the delays, confusion and everything else.

From the very start, this promotion had stated that a limited number of certificates are available each month and that one certificate was given per household, per address and per email.

Through third party marketing companies, I had signed for buy.com and (a separate one) for amazon.com, these certificates were to be given to me so I could reward our new members because the demographics of our website matches the desired of both companies. To make the pot sweeter, buy.com had promised to return a small portion of each certificate as a bounty for sending them a new sale.

All was going well, the months of August and September 2000 saw many people happily getting their certificates. Then in late October some news boards caught wind of the promotions and everything went crazy.

I went from giving away a couple of hundred a month to over 100,000 requests in less than 12 hours. The dollar value of this promotion just skyrocketed. At this time I was getting reports by BOTH marketing companies, SIGN, SIGN, SIGN! We can handle the volume; we have negotiating power inside these companies and we can deliver.

Well after a month of a frenzied membership drive, we started to get some signals from our databases. Many people were trying to fraud our database and sign-up for multiple certificates. Some people (who we track with an IP address) signed up as many as 40 and 50 certificates, with the slightest variations to make them legit.

Here are some problems I encountered in early December:

Ø The same people of so would sign under a slightly different names daily

Ø Certificates were starting be auctioned at popular sites for pennies on the dollar

Ø People would sign up under one name (a phony) and then deposit the certificate into their main account.

I know this is not 100% accurate, but it seems that over half of our database had at least a husband/wife combo or a work address/home address combo or a hotmail.com/yahoo.com email address combo.

This is when I needed to re-negotiate. Buy.com unofficially told us to slow down on Dec. 5 and then gave us the final word to halt in February. I have not seen any of the bounty money.

The marketing company that brought us the amazon.com deal is now disappeared. The good news is that they have not received all of the names that were on the list. And we have not heard of ANY abuses to the personal information they received. They were just over their heads.

And so was I. Digital-Neighbors is a small company. I am doing the best I can to make it in CyberSpace and I thought these certificates could bring some good traffic, and it has. Thank you.

The bottom line. Digital-Neighbors is committed to getting certificates to every person who signed up. If it means no profits until it happens, then that is how it will be. If any person wishes to be off of our mailing list, this does NOT forfeit their position.

The certificates will go out in a first-come-first-receive manner. I cannot make any promises how many are going out each day or week. But I promise that a steady flow will leave.

I’m sorry for all of the anger this had stirred in some of you, but please accept my humble apology and have faith that I will make good on my promise.

Thanks,

Tim Timmermann

Owner, Digital-Neighbors.com

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[LISA1013]

received the same email

[whitequeen96]

Wow, the poor guy! He certainly sounds sincere, but I don't know if he'll be able to stay in business if he doesn't make a profit. I won't hold my breath on this one.

[stking]

I really feel sorry for this guy. He was trying to get more people to his site and now has a nightmare on his hands!
Quote from his letter:
"Here are some problems I encountered in early December:

Ø The same people of so would sign under a slightly different names daily

Ø Certificates were starting be auctioned at popular sites for pennies on the dollar

Ø People would sign up under one name (a phony) and then deposit the certificate into their main account. "

This makes me so mad!! Yes, I will sometimes sign up two times thinking one for me and one for hubby since he never signs up for anything! But people signing up dozens of times is outrageous!! Don't some poeple have a conscience?? Now because of all these greedy people, those of us that only signed up one time (like I did on this one) may never get this gift certificate!

Well, thanks for letting me vent!! Maybe this will help some people think twice before getting too greedy!

[TEAMHOZIE]

bump

[mrbowler]

Bump

Any new updates?

[LISA1013]

nothing new here .. still waiting

[Pipanella]

Just received their newsletter this morning:

3) Site News

We are glad to announce that the marketing company sent out over 1,000 Amazon Gift Certificates in May. If you are on this newsletter list, then you are still in line. No one is more frustrated than we and we can sure understand how a broken promise looks. You have all heard how internet income has dropped? Well this marketing company is dropping, we are in constant contact with them and trying to get all our members the gift certificates. We appreciate that patience. They made the promises and we are looking bad for it. We hope this clears up some of the discussion and confusion of the issue.

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