A Few More Gold Benefits

It’s been a few months since we launched our first set of expanded gold benefits. Since then we’ve been able to sign on a few more companies, so we thought we’d announce those as well as answer some common questions about the gold benefits program. Here are the new merchants who have signed on since June:

• Our own redditgifts marketplace - giving out 5 free t-shirts a week and Elves 3-month memberships
• Bart’s Bakery - really good cookies. 20% off anything you buy from them.
• Betabrand - unique stylish clothes. 20% off anything. Maybe you saw my picture.
• iFixit - guides, parts, and tools for repairing… anything. $20 off purchases of $50 or more.
• Outgrow.me - buy successfully crowdfunded items. 15% off anything.
• Rover - background-checked dogsitting service by dog lovers. $50 credit.
• SOL Republic - HD headphones. 20% off purchases of $99 or more. Also giving out one free pair of headphones every month.
• Uber - private car service in many cities. $25 off your first ride.

For a full list, check out the page here: http://www.reddit.com/gold/partners

How do gold partners work? How do you select them?

We try to find merchants whose products we can test and personally recommend.  For every merchant featured here, there is at least one reddit employee (usually multiple) who feels the product offered by that merchant is really great and worth recommending to fellow redditors. In some cases we looked specifically for brands that redditors already know and appreciate, like Bart’s Bakery and iFixit, both of whom have done popular AMAs in the past.

No money changing hands

These aren’t advertisements for these merchants. They don’t pay us. They are extending promotional prices to redditors, and we don’t receive any of it. What we want is for every bit of the discount they’re willing to offer to go directly to redditors, so you’ll want to continue buying reddit gold.

You benefit most when it’s a merchant you’re already thinking about buying something from: most of the discounts are in the $20 or more range, so buying a month’s worth of reddit gold ($3.99, or less if you buy in bulk) should save you a ton of money.

Yes, it’s marketing, but it’s not how you think

Being one of our gold merchants helps to market these companies' products, right? Yes! But that’s not the whole story.

The best companies (we feel) are ones who make a good product and follow that up with great customer service. Nothing goes absolutely perfectly all the time, and you want to know that if you buy something the person who sold it to you will back it up. Thus, we have reddit discussion threads for every merchant and every gold feature in /r/goldbenefits - and we tell every gold merchant when they agree to sign on that they are expected to have someone who can solve problems and answer questions monitoring that subreddit and resolving issues post-haste. It’s customer service in public.

Good customer service shows you actually care about the people buying your products. But as it’s often a quiet thing, it’s hard to tell which companies do it well until you’ve bought something first, or heard via word-of-mouth - and that can be a slow process. What /r/goldbenefits does is provide a place for companies who really care about doing things right to demonstrate it to redditors.

The best companies often just focus steadily on making a good product and ensuring their customers are happy. With gold benefits, our goal is to help make it a little easier for you to find them.