Mr Grumpy Affiliate Has Another Moan

Author: Keith

30 Oct

I seem to be turning into an old cynic lately always having a moan about something, my previous posts Merchant 404 Pages and Why I dislike graphical emails are a just couple of recent examples.

Anyway I don’t like being an old whinge bag and I usually leave the complaining to others so in order to start looking at the bright side of things again I need to get a couple of things off my chest.

Merchants changing the URL structure of their websites… why oh why (like the points of view style?) can’t they put in place some form of mod rewrite / .htaccess to redirect old urls to new ones, not only will this save affiliates having a load of broken links it will also help the merchants own seo as the search engines will not be finding a million 404’s.

Reversals of sales – any merchant that has had an internet presence for any length of time knows what percentage of reversals they are likely to have, why not reduce the commission by this factor and pay out on everything, result happy affiliates and less admin to do.

Deeplinking – there really is no excuse in this day and age for an affiliate network not to have simple deeplinking in place, I wrote about Affiliate deep linking tools some time back, and these are excellent however, deeplinking should be as simple as adding the target url to the end of the affiliate code, its not rocket science.

Finally more a niggle than a moan, when you sign up to RSS by Email please don’t use an email address that sends an out of office reply because usually these go out between midnight and 2am and I really do hope you are out of the office at that time.

Right rant over now I hopefully can get get back to the business of trying to scratch a living.

If you have an opinion on any of my whinges or if you have a moan of your own please leave a comment below.

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Bad Practices, General

10 Responses for "Mr Grumpy Affiliate Has Another Moan"

Andrew Clapham October 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am 1
Excellent post – I know how frustrating the above points can be.

Don’t get me started on Merchants changing the URL structure of their websites….. and deleting images!!!
purple (3 comments.) October 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am 2
Blimey Keith are you taking over the victor meldraw role from the Duckman?

I must admit i agree with you re deeplinking, one of the first pieces of advice i got all those moons ago was deeplinking to the product will increase conversation, so any network which makes deeplinking hard in 2008 needs to go back to affiliate marketing school lesson one!
Jason Dale (2 comments.) October 30th, 2008 at 10:40 am 3
“Blimey Keith are you taking over the victor meldraw role from the Duckman?”

Oi.. cheeky blighter!! I’m as happy as Mr Happy, Head of Happiness Reasearch at the University of Happy, Happy Town, Just North of Happyshire!

Now that Keith bloke – he’s a miserable sod
Paul Smith (1 comments.) October 30th, 2008 at 11:37 am 4
Reversals of sales – The problem for merchants is that if they pay out on everything then it becomes quite simple to abuse the system.

Imagine the situation – I’m an affiliate and I click through my own link and go on a bit of a splurge, I spend £10,000 kitting out my living room with a brand spanking new plasma TV, complete with surround sound speakers and top of the range DVD player thingy, Bit of a bargain because i’ll save 10% (£1,000).

However i’m a bit of an unscrupulous affiliate and I decide 2 minutes after ordering I can’t afford it after all, so I call up the call center and tell them to cancel my order before it’s even been picked, no problems at all, most places will cancel it for you there and then.

See the problem here? If i’m a merchant who approves 100% of sales then i’m down £1000 in the blink of an eye because the commission will get approved.

Agree with the 301 redirects, agree with the deeplinking, but there are too many people out there who will (and most probably do) abuse the system if you simply pay out on everything.
Chris Brown (1 comments.) October 30th, 2008 at 11:40 am 5
Just to pick up on the deeplinking thing, I recently started looking at Linkshare for my aff sites and I have to say I am shocked that I can’t build my own simple deeplinks.
Lee McCoy (1 comments.) October 30th, 2008 at 1:21 pm 6
“old whinge bag” that was a perfect opportunity to link to me?!! oh well!
Chris Frost (4 comments.) October 31st, 2008 at 9:23 am 7
I see Toys-R-Us have just announced a change in URL structure, meaning that we all have to change deep linking. Great timing now that most affiliates have their websites all up and running
Joe Connor (1 comments.) November 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 pm 8
Spot on Keith, linkshare and not being able to deeplink at all is the worst offender of the lot but their text links do “degrade” gracefully after they expire to the merchant home page – something other networks could implement.
Tom_A November 10th, 2008 at 10:01 am 9
Hi Keith

Good point on the reversals. There’s nothing worse than getting some sales from a new site and then finding them vanish shortly after!
Dave B November 21st, 2008 at 11:51 am 10
Just expanding on Paul’s point about rejections, it is not only better for merchants to not pay on cancelled sales but affiliates as well.

If a merchant pays for cancelled sales they have to set a lower commission rate to accomodate this. Normal affiliates end up receiving less commission for true sales in effect having to subsidise the fraudulent activity. If programmes are set up to pay on all sales, they can be targeted by the unscrupulous, making it worse for everyone running proper activity.

It only seems like normal affiliates are missing out because the rejections are visible.

I think more merchants will move to only paying out on confirmed sales, after all isn’t the essence of affiliate marketing that a merchant pays only for sales.