There are several factors underlying our ability to offer a cost-effective science editing service that is of the highest quality (and comes with a full quality guarantee):

1. The scientific expertise of our editors ensures that they understand the technical content of each document that they work on. Furthermore, their refereeing and copy-editing experience makes them expert at communicating your scientific work to referees and journal editors using clear and correct English. One objective measure of the overall performance of any service is the client retention rate: more than 95% of our workload is from existing clients. We have clients in more than 30 countries, distributed approximately as follows: Japan, 30%; South Korea, 30%; Europe, 15%; Taiwan, 10%; and the rest of Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, 15%.

2. Another objective indication of the high quality of our service is that the manuscripts we have edited have been published in more than 300 different journals.

3. Our editors are former senior British academics who have emigrated to New Zealand to work as professional science editors. The cost of living in New Zealand is lower than that in most other industrialized countries (such as the USA, the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia). This means that our operating costs – and hence our charges – are lower than those of comparable high-quality editing services that are based in these other countries.

4. Almost all editing companies send out work to freelancers when their workload exceeds the capacity of their in-house editors. In contrast, we do not employ freelancers, which means that (1) our editors receive a greater proportion of the amount that you pay (given that companies that employ freelancers are acting as middlemen), (2) our editors have a greater commitment to the long-term success of ESE (since they are all long-term employees), and (3) we can guarantee the privacy of your document. In essence, our charges reflect the "spot price" of the availability of our very small number of highly qualified editors, rather than the averaged rate that applies to a large pool of independent freelancers (as is the case when you send your documents to other editing companies).

5. We operate a transparent pricing policy, in that all our clients pay the same, advertised amounts for our services. Therefore, clients need not be concerned that they might be missing out on a special price deal that another client is enjoying.

6. Our ability to accept credit card payments is due to our status as a merchant with a bank, which offers several significant advantages over editing companies whose merchant facilities are provided via one of the various third parties that now operate on the Internet (such as WorldPay and PayPal):

   1. The commission rates of a bank are significantly lower, and this saving is shared with our clients.

   2. Banks operate stricter approval processes for opening merchant accounts (which includes verification of the physical address of a company and personally meeting the company owners), so you can be more confident that you are dealing with a legitimate company.

   3. Payments using Visa and MasterCard arrive in our bank account within 24 hours, whereas this can take several days or even weeks with third-party services; the associated savings in interest payments are also shared with our clients.