Affiliates: Is That Merchant Cheating You Out of Commissions?

“Zilch, zip, nix, nada, nothing…”
In a NPT forum post entitled “Is This Odd?”, Kaycee reported:

“About 6 weeks ago, all of a sudden conversions from the one of those merchants completely tanked! Zilch, zip, nix, nada, nothing. I'm not doing anything different, links are working fine, their merchant account is active, nothing broken on their website that I can see and I'm still sending them more or less the same amount of traffic which is reflected in my Shareasale stats.”

Given those facts, my immediate assumption was that there was a problem at the merchant's checkout.

Sure enough, Kaycee discovered that affiliate commissions were NOT being tracked, and I suggested that Kaycee request to be compensated for lost commissions.

Kaycee's request was denied.

Most good merchants will compensate affiliates for downtime on the basis of past performance.

Some affiliate program managers will go one better and add a downtime ‘good faith' bonus as shown in the example below:

May 12, 2006 – Downtime compensation for May 11th

Late May 10th until very early May 11th, we came under a strong network attack. The total downtime lasted for approximately 3 hours, however all affiliates will be credited for 6 hours worth of time.

You should see the compensation amount, in the bonus column of your stats for May 11th. This amount is calculated by taking your average hourly earning for May, and multiplying it by 6.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your continued support and loyalty. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact your account rep.

Any merchant partner that does NOT compensate for downtime, especially downtime during which they continue to profit from traffic sent by affiliates, needs to be dumped.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,