Affiliates : Protect Yourself Against Unscrupulous Merchants
Over at Shawn Collins’ fantastic Affiliate Program Tip Blog, there’s an interesting post about what the biggest gripe is from being an affiliate.
The gist of this post, is our (the affiliate) inability to track sales accurately and, consequently, being at the mercy of the merchant. I’ve already made a post here about affiliate rip-offs but this just goes to reinforce the message.
If you’re setting up a campaign, either using PPC or organic search results, you’re going to be investing your time and money effectively doing a direct sales campaign for a 3rd party. If you don’t track your response rates, you could be losing a lot of money. I use a number of methods (click trackers, visitor counters and log analysing software) to try and minimise my (potential) losses.
Ultimately, there isn’t a great deal the affiliate can do if a merchant is going to rip you off at the sales end so be prepared to move on until you find those you have confidence in.
Comment by Mofaz J
I would like to share a recent experience. Here is the posting on my website:Unscrupulous merchants: Cautionary advise for affiliates
01-Jun-05 06:11:18 PM +0100 by Mofaz (www.aziesha.com)
I would like to share a bitter experience I went through recently as an affiliate. The lesson is, please investigate carefully what you are being paid for your marketing effort. It is not enough to rely on the information posted by merchant on the affiliate enrollment page. An interesting question to ask, what is the legal implication of the information put on such page? Is there a statutory declaration stating that you will be paid such and such?. The only information being given is very vague, e.g. : Affiliate will be paid a handsome 25% commission. And our sales figure for a purchase can be as high as USD100!
What does that tells you? Is that the average? Or is that the best case scenario? What if the main product, and the most popular they are promoting truly are just USD 5? Failing to consider this would result in severe resource taxation for those affiliates relying on paid advertisement.
The argument presented here so far is still debatable. Affiliate can be blamed for not doing a thorough research of the deal. But what about outright misleading information? An example.
“Our product price is USD100, and affiliates get 25%”. SO the affiliate start doing the maths; to break even, I need to spend USD25 in paid advertisement for one successful transaction. But when the statement comes, it shows only gUSD2.50 per transaction. Perplexed, the affiliate go to the merchant’s actual website and realize the sale price is actually USD10! So when they contacted the the affiliate program, they say it was a typo! Well as far as the affiliate is concerned it could well be an intended typo! SThe question to ask is, what is the legal status of the merchant enrolment advertisement? Is it legally bound?
These are the issues affiliates program need to address. While there is no black and white guideline on the problem yet, affiliates would do well to conduct the due diligence in every program they are participating
Mofaz
For Beginners’ guide to Internet Business, go to http://www.aziesha.com.