MutualPoints How-To Guide: Issue 2 - Ensuring you receive your rewards
It’s frustrating both for you and us when your purchases don’t get tracked or rewards get lost in the ether, so this guide will hopefully ensure that you get all that you’re due. Firstly though a brief introduction to how these things are tracked. Please bare in mind that this guide only deals with shopping, if you want to learn more about the rewardmail side of things head over to issue 1 of our how-to guide.
How MutualPoints tracking works - Cookies 101
The tracking of your purchases made via MutualPoints is done via small text files called cookies. They are downloaded to your computer and allow us to associate you with your purchases, and also to enable you to be logged in to MutualPoints every time you visit and other handy things.
So in order for your purchases to be rewarded with us we need to ensure that these are accurately in place. To do this in Internet Explorer is quite simple as it is set properly by default, but in case you’re unsure follow these steps to check:
1. Click on ‘tools’ in your browser bar, followed by ‘Internet options’ (as below)
2. Once there you need to select the ‘privacy’ option, which will display a screen similar to the one below:
3. Make sure that your settings are set to ‘medium’. That will ensure that you’re kept safe whilst still allowing cookies from respected sites such as MutualPoints to be used.
How MutualPoints Tracking Works - Cookie Length
The other important thing to consider is the cookie length our shopping partners impose on us. All the jargon can be a little confusing so let me try and explain. Most of our shopping partners use 30 day cookie periods, which basically means that from the time you click on your MutualPoints link to visit a shop, you have 30 days in which you can buy your goodies and you will get your reward.
Unfortunately not all shops are born equal, so some will offer more than 30 days, others will offer less. The easiest thing to do to ensure your transaction is tracked is to make sure you click directly from MutualPoints to the shop and make your purchase there and then. That will provide no opportunities for things to get lost in the ether (touch wood).
Hopefully that should provide a basic introduction to how the tracking works here at MutualPoints. As always, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to post them below.
