Hi all. I’ve been following your posts in the forum about payments and referrals and I wanted to take a minute to address some of your concerns and hopefully clear things up a bit.
Payments and Account Balances
First, payments and negative account balances. While building the new payment system, I found a few bugs in the old code that lead to inflated account balances. They were:
(1) a rounding error that rewarded people more than they should have earned for each order.
(2) an error that occurred when (re)submitting an idea with a coupon which resulted in credits to your account that shouldn’t have been made. For example, say you resubmitted an idea for $10 with a $25 coupon. It would deduct $10 from the coupon and then credit your account with the remaining $15. Oops.
(3) some of you were getting rewarded for a presales order that you did not complete.
(4) we removed referrals from presales influence as the rewards for referring one order were greatly outweighing the reward for say, ordering 30 units. This wasn’t fair to people stepping up and making large orders. Also, referral influence was being granted before orders shipped meaning that people were getting rewarded for unshipped orders.
Everyone’s case is different but they’re all likely the result of some combination of the above. And what seems common to all is that account credits were used for idea submissions, product orders, or payout requests based on the inflated account balances. With them now adjusted to their correct values, some of you have a negative balance. If so, don’t sweat it, you don’t owe us anything. You just have to earn your way back to positive, which for most of you affected, is not much and should happen soon given your influence.
Referrals
There’s been a good deal of discussion about how referrals work and what they mean. Let’s break it down. I’ll try to keep it simple.
(*) Anytime someone clicks thru your social sales link, a cookie is dropped on their computer with an expiration date of a year from now.
(*) All subsequent requests to quirky.com by that referred user will pass along this referral cookie for us to track.
(*) The only way that this cookie can be removed is if (1) a user clears their browser cookies, (2) a user visits quirky in another browser, or (3) a user registers, submits an idea, or buys a product.
(*) In the last case, we convert the referral to a user referral and track whether it was for an idea, order, or registration.
(*) All rewardable actions by that user in the next 30 days are then attributed to the referrer (you). So, even if you don’t refer someone directly to a product, you will still earn a reward if the person purchases a product in the next 30 days.
(*) If we didn’t have a cap, then everyone would be rewarded in perpetuity for every order their referred users submit. We just can’t do that. But you all do make good points about having some flexibility in the cap. I’d appreciate your comments below.
(*) And finally, referral rewards are distributed only when orders ship.
Some of you have questioned whether or not the referral system is working because you are seeing a high number of referrals but very few conversions. This is a symptom of the old system and some of the bugs it had.
I could get all technical on you here and drop some serious code-fu about polymorphic database associations and the butterfly effect of a single missed keystroke… but I won’t. I’ll just get to the point.
We’ll be awarding account credits this weekend to reward people for referrals that are not currently appearing in their balances. It will be a one time credit for the cumulative referrals rewards earned to date. From here on out, all referral rewards will be tracked as social sales for products.
Phew… that was a lot of thinking for a Friday night. I think I covered most of your questions, but if not, please let me know. I read the blog and forum everyday. So either way. It’s cool. In the meantime…
Time for a bottle of Malbec and a devil with a blue dress on 
Good night my quirkies.
