Time to focus on stock price

By: Robert Grosshandler | March 7, 2023

Existing members own lots of our stock. We’re now shifting our focus from ‘gain new members’ to focusing on getting those shares to be more valuable and more liquid (more easily turned into cash).

Revenue / earnings per share is the goalno more “free” stock

To get earnings per share up, we must stop creating new shares – we need to both stop diluting our stock AND suffering a charge against earnings for issuing that new stock. A double whammy. And when folks shop more, that ALSO depressed our earnings – the cost of the stock we issued for shopping was greater than the revenue we earned. Three strikes and we’re out.

Beginning March 10, 2023, iConsumer will no longer use its stock to attract and reward members. We’re going to focus on getting each of our existing members to use iConsumer more, without increasing the number of shares of stock. We’ll continue to use non stock related methods to increase membership.

The only reward we’ll offer is cashback. We had always said this day would come and now it has.  Stock earned or promised for actions that occurred before March 10, 2023 isn’t affected.

Why now?

Simply, it was time. We always said this day would come. There are very few things we can directly control to change the price of our stock. Here’s some of the bigger motivations behind the exact timing.

We think an increasing stock price affects revenue.

By far the biggest motivation. Our members seem to shop more when iConsumer is on the upswing.

The investment community doesn’t understand giving away stock.

Investors never liked our “giving away of stock“, no matter how rational and clear our explanations were. Potential investors have a negative emotional reaction to the perception of endless stock dilution. Investors didn’t care enough that the reduction in earnings by ‘giving away stock’ had no effect on cash, or that the market value of each shopper exceeded the dilutive factors. So on first glance, our financial statements were ugly, very ugly. And in today’s stock market, we don’t get a second glance.

It was never “free”.

In order to use our stock as a reward mechanism, iConsumer has to meet SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) requirements with regular and voluminous and EXPENSIVE filings. The SEC considers what we do to be selling you stock, not giving it away. This meant that the cost of the stock reduced our overall earnings. Dramatically. The faster we grew, the worse our financial statements would look.

Giving away stock was meant to launch us: we are launched.

We now have over 80,000 people who have earned stock. That’s an enormous number of shareholders. No two ways about it, we’re launched. Now we need to communicate that the stock you already own is affected by your using iConsumer and dealburner.

What next?

A focus on revenue per member. The launching of dealburner is a big plus and was an important factor in our timing of this announcement. Second, doing this in early March avoids the significant cost of the yearly SEC filings associated with offering our stock as a reward.

The cool new option – stock buy backs

One of the things that theoretically can help raise our stock price is for iConsumer to buy back its stock from shareholders. Not guaranteed to raise the stock price, but a pretty good bet. The SEC said we could not buy back our stock at the same time as we were “giving away” our stock.

Not only would a stock buy back possibly help to increase our stock price, it would solve one other very thorny issue. Getting a shareholder’s stock holdings into a stockbroker’s hands so that the stock could be sold in the stock market is near impossible, and if possible, ridiculously expensive.

When we launched iConsumer, it was easy and reasonably cheap for a shareholder to transfer their stock to a stock broker. Which is a necessary step to being able to sell that stock in the stock market. That changed, not just for iConsumer, but for all small “publicly-traded” companies. Interestingly, it is near impossible and very expensive no matter whether you own 100 shares or 1,000,000 shares. For those who care, the SEC and FINRA (the governing regulators) don’t seem to want to help fix that.

We have only begun to explore the option of stock buy backs. It’ll take some cash, of which we don’t have enough. More on this as we learn more. It’ll take time to work though the intricacies, so it’s not an immediate or certain option.

Additional revenue streams – dealburner to start.

There are a handful of brands (e.g. Amazon, Target ) that, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to work with rewards and loyalty sites like iConsumer. dealburner, owned by iConsumer but branded completely separately, is our opportunity to earn revenue without tying the purchase to an individual consumer.

If you shop Amazon – bookmark dealburner for great deals.

Questions? See our FAQ.

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7 Comments

matt, March 7, 2023 at 11:55 am

Couple of questions based on the latest news….

* I assume you will re-brand / re-position iConsumer. The initial pitch was about becoming a shareholder in a publicly traded startup company via online shopping. That message will obviously need to change.

* How do you plan to differentiate iConsumer from other cash back sites? Are you planning to offer a higher % back than competitors? Will this be a communicated message in some way?

* You mentioned making the stock more “liquid” / fluid…. in your mind, have enough shares been issued / created that iConsumer is in a position to be more heavily traded?

* For a while, we had the ability to purchase shares / invest in iConsumer directly, rather than on the open stock market. I assume that option goes away with this switch?

Thanks and looking forward to watching this evolution grow our company.

    Robert Grosshandler, March 7, 2023 at 2:00 pm

    Great questions.

    We think the ability to buy our stock in the stock market continues to give members the opportunity to become a shareholder in a public startup. And for less per share than the $.25 our current offering is at. For existing shareholders, they already have a stake. So while you’re not increasing your shareholdings, hopefully your shopping now works to increase the value of your existing shares.

    iConsumer is a pure play cashback site that you can own (and over 80,000 people already have a stake). You can’t do that with any other cashback site that I’m aware of. Where else can a shareholder affect stock price by shopping?

    What I think about the number of shares doesn’t really count, and it’s nothing we can control. It’s what the market thinks and does. There are about 3,000,000 shares, give or take, that have been transferred to brokerage accounts. A small percentage of the issued and outstanding shares. I would love it if this move influences folks to shop more, and buy more of our stock. If the price of the stock goes up, then I think that convincing brokerage firms to take it becomes easier (not necessarily easy).

    We are closing the Reg. A+ offering as of March 10, 2023. That was the vehicle for us to offer it widely, and for it to be purchased by more or less anybody. We are not stopped from selling our stock (there are more hoops to jump through, but not terrible ones). If somebody asks without advertising, there is a way to sell it. What we cannot do is offer (promote) our stock for sale. If we want to, and the economics justify it, we can always open a new offering, on same or different terms.

Jeremy Zung, March 13, 2023 at 6:05 pm

Will the existing rwrdp continue as a publically listed and tradable stock ?

    Robert Grosshandler, March 13, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    The only thing that has changed is that iConsumer no longer offers stock for sale to the public, and no longer uses it stock as a reward. The buying and selling of it via the OTC public market is unaffected. The buying and selling of it between individuals is unaffected.

Cassandra, April 7, 2023 at 2:54 pm

I really don’t understand any of this, so our stocks that we now have are worthless? And we won’t ever get anymore stocks, just cash? I also notice that we aren’t able to get a check issued to us for our cash back that we accumulated, but have to convert our cash to stocks. And it also seems that the cash I accumulate keeps getting less and less instead of more. This doesn’t make any sense to me at all if we can’t do anything with our stocks, and I was under the assumption that the more I bought the more stock we got back the more our company was worth. I don’t know much about the stock market, but none of this sound very promising to me. So it sound to me like the more I tried to buy more from our stores to make our company better, and help me get stocks back for my effort for an investment wasn’t working, so now we are going to have to sell our stocks back to you, so “our” company can thrive? And become just one more cash back, that is worthless, because we can’t even get that back.

    Robert Grosshandler, April 8, 2023 at 8:45 am

    Thanks for the comment.

    I don’t think our stock is worthless, even if it isn’t held in a stock brokerage account. Just harder to sell. Lots of things are hard to sell.

    You’re not prohibited from selling your stock yourself, you just don’t have the stock market as a formal place to buy or sell RWRDP. The price in the stock market should affect / guide the price paid in private sales. We’ve seen nice price and volume activity in the stock market lately.

    The goal currently is to make it easier to sell. And we expect that will make our stock worth more. If the stock market recognizes that our stock is worth more, and prices it accordingly (give or take above $4/share), then it should become much, much easier to sell. No guarantees to any of this, of course.

    One of the ways that we think we can make our stock worth more is to offer shareholders the opportunity (but not the obligation) to sell it back to us. We’re not able to do that yet, but we did remove one of the roadblocks, which was we never could do it while we were offering stock back.

    As to your comment about cash back, I’m confused. We send out checks monthly for cash back.

jerry, September 8, 2023 at 2:36 pm

What a pity. I wanWhat a pity. I want to have more shares, OTC trading is too slow.t to have more shares, OTC trading is too slow.


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