How honest are merchants?

[abelony]

Hello everyone.

I have been thinking about this for some time now and want your thoughts on this as well. Are merchants 100% honest when it comes to their affiliates? I will take Linkshare merchants for example. All I see when I run the reports is what has been reported by the merchants to Linkshare. Now, how likely is it and have there actually been cases where a merchants alter their transaction records before submitting them to Linkshare? What kind of detection methods does Linkshare and other affiliate networks use? Maybe I shouldn't be concerned but I haven't found any discussions on this topic anywhere.

[davesplace1]

I don't think you have to worry about the large public companys like Amazon. Too many employees that could blow the wistle to the SEC. Smaller companys, most are legit, but it is a buyer beware thing. Bottom line go with the higest eCPM merchants IMHO.

[Chris]

I think some smaller merchants likely do this. For instance there was a merchant I was promoting through linkshare, very small. For some reason despite the traffic I was sending I was getting paltry sales.

Linkshare deactivated the merchant a couple months after I had joined, from what I could tell the merchant had done something wrong (not playing by the rules, not paying, dunno).

I then joined a CJ program that was nearly identical, just a different merchant (still a small one though) sales increased.

I don't think large companies would do this because of the lawsuit potential. Like if Dell did this it'd basically be fraud and they could be hit by large punitive damages. Smaller companies are more likely to take that risk, and they're more likely to need to take that risk because of monetary issues. If a large company had monetary issues they'd probably simply not pay and then fight out whether or not they have to pay in court (or file chapter 11).

These affiliate networks have high setup costs though and I think that will keep a merchant honest. If you get kicked out of a network you don't get those costs back.

[5starAffiliates]

Although I am often accused of wearing rose colored glasses, I do believe most merchants are honest. ALL of the ones I know are and I know a lot of them.
Sometimes however honest mistakes are made - a programmer changes something in the cart and loses the tracking pixel or whatever, so when in doubt even with good merchants, it does not hurt to do a test purchase.

[Cutter]

This is quite common in the adult industry.. however the merchants are only hurting themselves.

This is usually called "shaving." Now, if a company is not paying out, say 5% or 10% of what they owe, it may simply be ignored even if someone suspects they are getting ripped out. If they pay out 25% of the sales affiliates earned them, then they are going to get dropped and their sales are going to go down the toilet cause they'll lose the traffic.

Sometimes merchants become arrogant (nad a bit greedy) and think that the people that send them converting traffic are "adding nothing to the transaction." Well, I got news for them... and they can figure it out the hard way.

[abelony]

I was curious about this because of the following:
- I sent a merchant 8 uniques in two days and got 2 sales.
- Seeing that the conversion wasn't that bad, I sent another 30. This resulted in no sales. I have contacted the merchant to make sense of this but they say it may be a Linkshare problem. I will wait a few more days (I don't know if any of you have noticed but there is a serious issue going on right now with Linkshare reports).

[ozgression]

I believe that affiliate networks also run tests on their merchants from time to time to ensure they track affiliates properly.

However, if the affiliate program is self-contained, than, this obviously doesnt happen.
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[Chris]

I was curious about this because of the following:
- I sent a merchant 8 uniques in two days and got 2 sales.
- Seeing that the conversion wasn't that bad, I sent another 30. This resulted in no sales. I have contacted the merchant to make sense of this but they say it may be a Linkshare problem. I will wait a few more days (I don't know if any of you have noticed but there is a serious issue going on right now with Linkshare reports).
Those numbers aren't high enough to be statistically significant. I wouldn't worry.

[nohaber]

I cannot be dishonest with my affiliates. Everything is automated by share-it (including payments, stats etc.). Even if I want, I can't hide affiliate sales, unless I put an affiliate tracking code in the ordering URL that will override all other affiliates.
The only thing affiliates should worry is when customers delete their tracking cookies. That's esp. important with shareware because the sale can be made many days after the referral.

[contactplus]

Yes it's true that deleting tracking cookies from most shareware will have a nullifying effect on an affiliate sales. However, companies such as RegNow implement custom builds of their vendors shareware so that the registration process is impervious to the absence of cookies. The shareware itself looks in the registry for the affiliate URL and is then properly redirected to the order location on RegNow thereby assuring the affiliate of a commission. I've implemented to code my self on several of my products.

Ed
http://www.contactplus.com