Reversing An Affiliate Sales Is Easy… Or Is It?
QGJ ( Moderator at A4U Forums) raised a very good point today highlighting the issue that “some” merchants find it all to easy to reverse affiliate sales. Expanding on this point he calls for a change in the way these reversals are classified and the need for additional reporting informaiton within the network interface.
“Also it would be very nice & convenient as standard for any network overview report to have:
- 1. Compulsary columns in overview report showing reversal commission AND reversal %. I think these are of as much relevance as any other figures such as sales generated. = Transparency
- 2. Charts should show network wide as well as individual results for reversal commission AND reversal % for each month = Transparency. With monthly trend graphs too.”
Both as an affiliate and as the affiliate manager for several affiliate programs I agree with QGJ 100%.
I would definitely encourage all networks to allow merchants/affiliate managers to input the exact reason for a reversal and not just select “other” which isn’t helpful to either party. This is something that is very prominent in my daily routine at the moment as we have a couple of affiliates brand bidding and subsequently having their sales removed. Just to top things off they have removed their contact details and are ignoring any email sent through the network interface. I would dearly love to put “breach of terms and conditions” rather than “other” as a reason. Why the affiliates continue to buy traffic with no chance of a return is beyond me?! Anyway, this also leads me onto my next point…
Is it fair that a program is forced to publicly display reversal rate X% when in actual fact this could be down to one or two affiliates that continue to brand bid as in the above scenario? In theory the program could actually have a reversal rate of O%! As QGJ correctly points out there is an opportunity here for networks to include individual reversal rates in addition to network reversal rates but how many affiliates who have yet to sign up to the program will be put off by this visible and damaging reversal rate figure without digging deeper and discovering the truth?
When we talk about transparency I believe this should apply just as strongly to affiliates in addition to merchants and networks who seem to take the brunt of it nowadays. Nothing irritates me more than having to spend hours tracking down affiliates who withhold contact information, send traffic with out a referring URL (or networks that refuse to divulge this info), and think they can get away with using Froogle etc.
I respect the need for affiliate privacy but I believe the people who run programs have just as much right to know where and how traffic is delivered in order to accurately maintain a healthy program. Perhaps a topic for another thread?
The subject of an official Affiliate Association to safe guard the interest of it’s members is not a new one, nor is it in anyway a reality (yet!). I’d like to think that if and when it does come into fruition that an independent audit process could help dispel the idea that there’s anything untoward going on with affiliate reversals on the whole and should somebody get caught doing something that they shouldn’t, may they be punished accordingly.
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