Sweet, we all need more stuff.

P.s. Can you tell us more about the financial scheme at play? I'm pretty hesitant to support the sort of "$0 of every purchase goes to the store/restaurant" thing that restaurant.com does. I understand the idea that it brings in bodies that would otherwise be in the store, but it tends to result in a lot of bitter proprietors that get locked into a promotion they can get out of.

I guess my questions are:

What cut of the gift cert price does the establistment get?

Are they contractually locked into this for a certain length of time?

What company actually administers this?

What happens if a business goes under? (restaurant.com is pretty well known for exchanging gift certs for those of other companies in that situation)

Thanks for any answers.

Hi Boxxy, thanks for asking...



1. Unlike the deal with restaurant.com, we give businesses advertising in exchange for gift certs sold. For every dollar of gift certs sold, the business gets an equal amount of dollars to spend on advertising with the Mercury as they see fit.



2. They are only contracted to honor all gift certs sold. The business sets a limit on the total number of certs to be sold, but they can opt out of the program at anytime and not incur any penalty or be forced to continue selling gift certs through Merc Perks.



3. The Portland Mercury administers this; we do not use any outside company.



4. If a business we have issued a gift cert to goes out of business before the GC is redeemed, we will refund the purchase in full.



I hope this answers your questions. If you have any other questions or ideas on how to improve the program, let us know.



Thank you!

Sounds good, thanks!

Do these gift certs have an expiration? That would be good info to include on the page.

They expire after a year. Thanks, I'll try to get that info up on the site!