Beyond simple affiliate links, we communicate regularly with our partners. This can take many forms, for example, if they notify us in advance during promotional campaigns, or if many members report problems with a deal order. However, being a partner does not mean that you can post any offer on the site.
As stated in our publication rules, self-promotion (posting or posting your own offers) is prohibited on Upucuza for the simple reason that to share a deal in its own interest (and not in the interest of the community) totally skews the neutrality of the site. Moderation impartially ensures that each publication complies with this rule.
We understand that a merchant wants to promote an offer by posting it on Upucuza, but his own interest will be, for a merchant, always before the interest of the community. It’s perfectly normal to want to promote its offers, but Upucuza is not a billboard, so it’s neither our role nor our wish to let the merchants advertise themselves, especially in a misleading way. (because self-promotion goes through user profiles that could pass for disinterested members).
A “normal” member (ie independent and not affiliated with a merchant) will meanwhile share a deal for the community, which changes everything. Our vigilance in self-promotion is an integral part of our values.
However, over time, we realized that some deals, though self-promotional because posted by the merchants, were still very good and of interest to the community. So we set up an editorial team (not to be confused with the moderation team) that acts as a filter between the merchants and the community to ensure the neutrality of the content.
The partners thus have a dedicated platform that allows them to propose deals, which our team of editors decides to publish or not according to the interest of the offers for the community. Thanks to this space of exchanges, we have the opportunity to explain to our partners why we reject some of their proposals, and the editorial team is the sole judge of the relevance of the proposed offers.
Of course, we do not communicate any personal information about our members and users to our partners!
How are the deals proposed by partners different from self-promotion?
The deals offered directly by our partners are evaluated and filtered by our editorial team – it is basically a very private newsletter system, where the merchants inform us of their current and future promotions, among which draft searches to keep only the good plans that will please the community.
The rules of the game are very clear and so it is very different from the wild self-promotion, where merchants are trying to pass themselves off as consumers to pass an offer at any price. Self-promotion is a dishonest and damaging process for the community (we sometimes have to refuse interesting deals because the merchant does not play the game of trust), while the offers offered by the partners are informative and transparent
