Of victory and defeat, confrontation is the victor!
It’s a very simple strategy. The observation of suspicious merchant activity is posted. The merchant is invited to the discussion and confronted with the facts. The resulting action or inaction determines whether the merchant’s affiliate program is listed in the trusted merchants list or the un-trusted merchants warning list. There is no brow beating, threats, or insults, but “just the facts ma’am“. The consequences are either good press, or bad press. And Internet press lasts forever.
A Victory…
It was discovered that Gold Star Nutrition (www.powerthin.com) exhibited extraneous reversal rates in their affiliate program statistics on Shareasale. A merchant alert * was sent. The next morning, John from Gold Star Nutrition registered with Affiliate Trust and constructive discussion ensued. John answered affiliate’s questions and explained the reason for the spike in reversals. Affiliates went away happy and John’s affiliate program earned a place on the trusted merchants list that is being developed for inclusion in the forum very soon. This is one of several recent victories resulting from Affiliate Trust merchant alerts *.
A Defeat…
While researching affiliate programs for fragrance merchants, a member noticed leaks on unlimitedperfumes.com, the website of Unlimited Perfumes Inc, a Shareasale merchant. The leaks included banners to other fragrance merchants and Google ads. A merchant alert * was sent on May 25th with no response and a second attempt was made to invite the merchant to the discussion on July 5th. A representative registered the next day and joined the discussion. He/she posted the reasoning that “Often time what we are seeing is the ads HELP us to convert at a higher rate because our pricing is the lowest on the market.“. After a little more discussion he/she assured us that “I have had my programmer remove all analytics and affiliate code, pending further discussion as a company. There should be no more “leaks.”“. This sounded good, but it was soon discovered that a price comparison banner leads to perfumecompare.com, another website owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. The plot thickens! On perfumecompare.com there were links to other perfume sites. Some of these other sites are also owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. Here’s the kicker… Other sites linked to from perfumecompare.com are fragrance sites that Unlimited Perfumes Inc. is an affiliate of! Oh what a tangled web we weave when… well you know! Not only is affiliate traffic potentially leaked to AdSense ads, but the traffic that Unlimited Perfume’s own affiliates deliver is redirected to earn Unlimited Perfumes commissions AS an affiliate. When these facts were presented to the rep, he/she disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since.
Unlimited Perfumes owns…
unlimitedperfume.com
unlimitedperfumes.com
perfume-room.com
perfumeroom.com
perfumecompare.com
They are affiliates of at least these…
FragranceNet
Perfume Worldwide
FragranceX
Scented Monkey
While I labeled the Unlimited Perfumes effort a defeat, is it really? The knowledge of merchants to avoid is as valuable as the knowledge of trusted merchants to join. That the confrontation happens is what matters!
AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org
*Merchant Alerts is an exclusive feature of Affiliate Trust. Members may send official alerts to merchants through email under the umbrella of Affiliate Trust. The identity of the sender is not exposed and the emails are sent through the AT email system. These alerts notify the merchant of active discussion about their affiliate program and the type of concern raised by affiliates. They are invited to join the discussion and address the concerns of affiliates.
5 Responses to “Of victory and defeat, confrontation is the victor!”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by EdByerly [...]
July 8th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I agree that the confrontation is what matters. Saying nothing, changes nothing.
Far too often, affiliates feel like their voices aren’t heard about things that affect them directly. The Merchant Alerts provide a method for affiliates to at least bring certain matters to the merchants/AMs attention. You will see results from some and many times silence from others. The silence or lack of action by a merchant/AM to take care of an affiliate’s concern, speaks volumes. It lets affiliates know whether to even join a program or continue relationships.
It is amazing how many leaky merchants there are out there and honestly most have never heard a word from affiliates. In the case of Unlimited Perfume, affiliates work hard to drive traffic to the merchant’s website and it is unfair to see such misuse of their efforts. The lack of action so far does speak volumes.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Affiliates are the greatest asset to an affiliate program, not the program itself. Merchants would do well to give them an ear as well as the tools they want to successfully promote the products.
Manipulating the program in such a way that’s detrimental to the success of their affiliates is also detrimental to the success of their program.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I have read through the whole thread and Unlimited Perfume’s silence indicates that they don’t have much to talk about what they are doing with affiliate’s traffic. Unlimited Perfumes website still shows banners and leaks. Hopefully they will remove the banners and advertisements. This is all we want.
Your actions could overcome your silence. Let your actions speak for yourself that you care for your loyal affiliates.
Dave.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Ed,
Great post.
It sounds like Unlimited Perfumes is being dishonest and it will come back to them. I do not know the full situation though. Maybe they are ignorant. Maybe they are short-staffed. Who knows?
But the fact remains that what they are doing is WRONG and they either need to fix it or suffer the consequences. My hope is that it is the former.