RollingOrder eMerchant Newsletter

Danbury, CT — RollingDigital™ announced the rollout today of Version 3.0 of its online transaction processing and precision performance marketing platform. This version marks a significant set of improvements over prior versions. "We essentially started with the hardware and rebuilt the system from the ground up," proclaims Walt Runkis, the company's CEM. The new platform is hosted on dual-processor, high-speed, RAID-5 servers running all the latest hardware and software goodies. "We only have a few of our eMerchants running on the new system now, and they are reporting substantial improvements in performance and security." Some of the new improvements are:

Security Upgrades

* Significantly "beefed-up" firewall and server-level anti-virus protection.

* Server-level anti-spam protection eliminates a large number of nuisance emails before they ever reach your workstation.

* Stronger anti-hacking and encryption protocols protect merchants and customers from fraud and theft.

* All eMercant sites are redundantly mirrored on our secondary standby server so all hosting and database systems functions came be rerouted should our primary system fail.

Affiliate Precision Performance Marketing Upgrades

* Entire affiliate program was extensively upgraded. It is a common practice to set an affiliate/merchant recognition cookie on the customer's workstation so the merchant knows who gets the commissions on sales. The problem here is, if this cookie is destroyed or corrupted, commissions cannot be accrued. Also, since our system must work on and off the web, a stronger system needed to be devised. That is why we created an entirely new Promo Code handling system and set of self-healing cookie protocols.

* New Promo Code handling. In previous versions, a unique Promo Code was automatically generated whenever an affiliate signed-up with each merchant. These codes were symbols that pointed to particular merchant/affiliate links. The problem here is that any number of RollingOrder affiliates can form relationships with any number of RollingOrder merchants, who in turn can form links with any number of customers. (It's like a game of 3-dimensional chess gone wild.) This being the case, an energetic affiliate might end up with 50 or more Promo Codes, and that is certain to cause headaches. The new Promo Code system assigns a unique Promo Code to each Affiliate, and that code is used for all affiliate merchant relationships. We also created a means of storing the cookie identification information so that non-web-based affiliates and distributors can participate using ground-based or wireless phones, print advertising, and mail-order systems. Version 3.0 also restores lost cookies whenever customers log-in to merchants' websites.

* New Promo Key. In previous versions, text and banner ads vectored customers to a merchant's entry page. From there, customers needed to navigate to the appropriate product pages to find what they wanted. Our new Promo Key allows web developers to create direct links from affiliate sites to send customers directly to a merchant's product page. Now affiliates can right-click and download a photo of a product they want to offer from a merchant's website and create a custom link to the product using the Promo Key and send the customer directly to the product. This is very similar to the way Amazon works with affiliates.

* Moving eMerchant websites and email considerations. This weekend we will begin migrating our remaining merchant websites from the old server to to new one. We will notify each of you before the move, and coordinate email handling. Everything should be seamless, except we have no way to transfer email that is stored on the server. CAUTION: If you use Webmail as a mail client and store your email on the server you WILL LOSE ALL EMAIL when your site is moved. Long-term storage of email on the server is an unsafe practice and should be avoided as a rule. Please set-up Outlook or Outlook Express and download your mail off the server ASAP. WE WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST EMAIL.

* New addresses. Once your website is located on the new server you will have full access to all of the features discussed above, plus a bunch more that you will find in your eMerchant Administrator Control Panel. One of the major changes to Version 3.0 deals with how merchants, affiliates and customers navigate to their respective control panels, and how those control panels recognized each individual and self-configure its look and feel accordingly. In prior versions, this was done by assigning each merchant- and affiliate-control panel a unique subdomain address, such as http://affiliates.rollingdigital.com. Since every eMerchant needed three separate sub-domain addresses to function correctly, it would amount to thousands of subdomains. Version 3.0 needs only three:

   -- http://admin.rollingbank.net      (your eMerchant Control Panel).
   -- http://affiliates.rollingbank.net (your Affiliate's Control Panel).
   -- http://member.rollingbank.net   (your Customer's/Member's Control Panel).

* General information. The upgrades mentioned above only mention the more important changes. There are many more—some were cosmetic—but there were also a large number of upgrades that make the system stronger, safer, more fault tolerant, more efficient, and easier to use. Most of these are "under the hood," so to speak, and may not be immediately visible. Version 3.0 has been thoroughly test and has been doing business for a couple months now. As always, if you find a bug that we or the beta-testors missed please fill out a trouble ticket at: http://support.rollingdigital.com. One problem that is likely to occur is some of your affiliate and customer links may not survive the transfer from the old database to the new one. This shouldn't pose much of a problem: customer links will automatically be renewed as soon as a customer logs in for a sale or to access his or her control panel, and affiliate relationships can be easily relinked from your Merchant Control Panel.

* Policy changes. Starting this March, we will no longer provide free web hosting to eMerchants who DO NOT process an average of at least $5,000 in online sales each month. Accounts that are below that figure will be charged $19.95 per month for hosting. These charges will be billed to your credit card. After your site is transferred to the new server, please be sure you have a valid credit card number entered in your personal information file. You access that from your eMerchant Control Panel. If paying by credit card is unacceptable, you can pay by check for a year's hosting service in advance. Please contact Walt if you want to pay annually by check.

We thank you for being a member of our growing eMerchant family. Our online transaction processing and precision performance marketing platform is the only service in the world that accomplishes all these services on one seamless platform. Version 3.0 is a significant upgrade that has taken nearly nine months to write and test. That's great, you shout, but what can we expect next?

* Coming Attractions. We are in the process of closing a deal that will give us the ability to take checks online and convert them into instant cash. The reason will have resisted "eChecks" for so long is they were very unsafe. Traditional eChecks could take 3 to 7 banking days to clear before the funds were safely in our possession. This left us extremely vulnerable to fraud. The system we are putting in place removes the funds from the customer's account in real time, making them as safe (or safer) than credit card payments. Once this feature is up and running, we will essentially be able to provide the most important services that PayPal provides. We will also take that a step further by creating a "Wallet System" that will allow two members to transfer money between their accounts. This will effectively gives us the ability to create "Virtual Debit Cards." More on this exciting development will be released in the future. Stay tuned! We tell you how this can earn you money. Also, as you may have noticed from the new control panel addresses shown above, RollingBank™ isn't far off. You'll hear more about that later too.

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For more information about RollingDigital:

RollingDigital™ was founded in 2001 with the mission of “Building Tomorrow’s Information Paradigm.” To this end, we have developed a group of information technologies (patents pending) which make it possible and practical to create the “global content economy” we call ContentMogul™. RollingOrder™, RollingBank™ and TravelingMultimedia™ are wholly owned subsidiaries of RollingDigital, LLC. They were built to facilitate a wide range of online and wireless financial transactions. Our online transaction processing platform is a complete order-entry system that is fully integrated with a precision performance marketing engine that runs on a totally redundant, ultra-secure, ecommerce platform. State-of-the-art security is maintained by using an integrated set of near-military grade data encryption protocols.

Contact:

Walt Runkis
Voice: +1 203.445.9975
walt@rollingdigital.com

www.rollingdigital.com
www.rollingorder.com
www.contentmogul.com

Funding for RollingDigital was provided by Scibios, LLC www.scibios.com.

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