Ready to Launch

We are officially launching raff.me next Wednesday , May 21st, in a press conference together with Microsoft and pasiona. Microsoft will be present with Enrique Fernández-Laguilhoat, Director of Platform and Development explaining the platform and technologies used in our development and David Teixidó, CEO of pasiona, the Microsoft Gold Partner that has carried out the actual development.

That will be the start of a series of marketing campaigns combining the online and the offline world to start spreading the concept of the platform and the different promotional raffles (some of them free).

Payment Gateways

When you arrive at the payment page of a web site, you have the feeling of finalising a journey. You have googled through different sites, made your choices, compared similar offers and probably read feedback from other users on the product or the service you are acquiring.

You have made your decision. You are buying. You just have to pay for it. Simple.

Or not. Because there is nothing simple when there is a bank involved.

Payment Methods were never  present in the list of risks or complicated duties when we designed the project. It was one in a bunch of agreements with suppliers, but nothing special. It has turned out to be one of the main time consuming and frustrating parts of the process.

PayPal does not accept us because we fall in the category of gaming companies. No problem, there are other options. Neteller, Ukash… but they charge very high fees.

Credit Cards are the main option, but we have to be careful with chargebacks and fraud. 3DSecure is an option to avoid risks, but the majority of card holders are not enrolled for it. Some banks directly reject your transactions if you are an adult content or gaming site and you do not use 3DS. Other banks make it difficult for their customer to enrol and you get more than 50% of their transactions rejected due to lack of enrolment...

… there is a complex world behind a payment page.

Customer Care

Alleluia! We finally have a telephone line and Internet connection in our office in Malta. It took more than a month to get the office running. We have been working from home for the past few months and we were waiting to start working in the office and separate our personal and professional life.

Our office in Malta will be initially be attending our customer's questions and requirements in English, German and Spanish.

Customers can contact us through different channels:

e-mail: We will reply as soon as possible. ( support@raff.me )

The community: There is a community section on our website where any user can post questions, opinions, suggestions… and other users will reply. Our Community Managers will post comments and act as moderators.

Telephone: There is a local number in every country that is routed through voice over IP to Malta. (Initially Spain, France and UK)

Twitter: We have created a twitter account and we will tweet relevant information to our followers and users can send messages. @raffme_es in Spanish, @raffme_en in English and @raffme_de in German.

Facebook: We are setting up a facebook page for each language.

Unfortunately we can't offer 24x7 customer care . We will initially be available from 10 to 8 and depending on how things move, we will adjust accordingly.

Our Customer Care strategy is to be direct and transparent. If something is not working, we will be quick to admit it and even quicker to solve it.

Raffles vs Reverse Auctions

Reverse Auction websites are appearing lately like flies on a cake. Some of the sites try to confuse the users by saying it is a raffle and others provide a complete explanation of  how they work. The main difference is: A Raffle is considered as gaming because the result depends on random numbers, and Reverse Auctions are not considered as gaming, because there is no randomness involved.

Another big difference is that if your activity is gaming, you need a license to operate and you are audited and have to comply with many anti-fraud regulations. Reverse Auctions are not subject to any regulation or licensing. Those sites are therefore not supervised or monitored by any authority. Their processes and software are not validated, so their prize assignation process doesn't need any approval  or compliance with any guidelines. They can literally do what they want and the user is completely helpless if he wants to complain, because there is no authority to appeal to.

www.raff.me is located in Malta. The company’s operations are licensed and regulated by the Lotteries and Gaming Authority of Malta (LGA) http://www.lga.org.mt/ . 

What's www.raff.me ?

www.raff.me is a new Business Model on the Internet. It is a new service platform that allows any user to create a raffle for new or used goods and promote it to obtain higher earnings compared to a normal sales process. On the other side, all other users can participate in the raffle by buying tickets with a high probability of winning.

There are many things we would buy, but they are classified as whims and wishes in our budget. The kind of things that are not really needed, but we fancy having. Raff.me is the place to give luck a chance for just a few Euros.

I think the best way to know how it works is to view the video.

Follow the link http://www.youtube.com/user/rafflimited#p/u/8/s2pvg1loMGU

Be Social my Friend

Open your mind to the net, be social.

If you are not on the net you become an hermit,

If you tell what others do, you become a blabbermouth,

If you tell others what you do, you become social.

Be social my friend.

Times are changing and the internet has changed how we live our lives and how we build our relationships. Those changes invaded our personal relationships and we got used to it, but now the change is affecting our professional lives to. It is changing how we do business, how we interact with our customers, our suppliers and our competitors, by demanding greater transparency and participation.

I just started this blog with the intention of being social, with the idea of sharing with whoever could be interested, the experience of launching a new business model on the net, www.raff.me

I will appreciate suggestions, criticisms and any opinion that could help me and my team do it better. I am facing different challenges here, professional and personal. Personally speaking, I am not the kind of hyper-social guy who needs to be socialising all day, I am more of a family man who prefers a good book rather than a good party, so that's challenge no. 1 "Be Social my Friend". Challenge no. 2 is, how you start up a company telling everybody what you are going to do and sharing your strategy with the world without being afraid of competition or being copied? Well, you all have the answer, because the risk is worth your feedback and opinion.

We are launching in a few days, so the following posts will be a short summary of what has happened till today to help you understand what's happening.

And remember, be social my friend.