I was intrigued by a recent A4U thread where a (rather irate) merchant, Blushing Buyer,  whom I’ve worked with for a few years announced they were: -

“closing the program as we really can’t be bothered with the scheming, thieving, lazy affiliates(I use the term affiliate reservedly, it should be reserved for those who actually do some work) who do nothing but steal existing customers, or the lazy and incompetent networks who are doing nothing to stop them.”

They have decided to dump their network, Affiliate Window. And take programme management in-house.

I must hasten to add this wasn’t a blanket statement about all affiliates, you can read the rest of the post and the discussion that followed afterwards here.

A Knee Jerk Reaction?

Many people felt that Blushing Buyer should really have taken more personal responsibility for managing these issues, and pointed out they’d have issues finding affiliates for an in-house offering. Personally, I was more interested in finding out what had gotten a quality merchant so thoroughly pissed off with a Network which has one of the best reputations in the industry. So I decided to ask Steve, the MD of Blushing Buyer, for some more comments to give a bit of insight into how merchants see our industry, the services they get from networks, and what had brought him to his decision.

1. Clearly you feel very strongly about the experience you’ve had as a merchant. What would it take for you to decide to maintain a network presence? i.e. What service do you feel you should be getting for the 30% override?

Kirsty, my comments on the forum are probably a little harsh, they were written quickly, by someone who was very angry. We’ve been running an affiliate program on Affiliate Window for about 7 years, we were one of their first merchants so I have a good understanding off how affiliate marketing should work, and how it doesn’t.

In that time I can count the number of time the network has called me on one hand, now I don’t expect to be called once a month, but some regular personal contact, along with some advice on running the program should be part and parcel of the service that they offer. The technical tracking, and paying the affilaites is important, but so is developing the program. We often felt that the network was in the way of us developing our program and communicating with our affiliates

Coming back to the final reason that we decided to end our program, dodgy affiliates. There have been dodgy affiliates around since affiliate marketing was invented. The industry seems to be very reluctant, or at best very slow to deal with these affiliates.

At the end of last month we noticed that two or three voucher code affiliates were breaking our terms and conditions by using pop unders while promoting a voucher code that didn’t exist. These affiliates were listed in google in 2 and 3 for a search on our brand name, so they were stealing a lot of commission. We suspended them, and rejected all their commission.

I waited for Affiliate Window to contact me and ask why, you would have thought that as we’d just declined about 30% of our monthly commisions that they would wonder why. No, not at all, silence. Those affiliates should be chucked out of Affiliate Window completely, and their names blacklisted across all the networks. The network stands to gain by retaining these affiliates, remember, they get 30% override on all commisions. The only party losing is the merchant. Well, until merchants wake up and realise that a large %age of sales through their affiliate channel are canibalised from their other marketing efforts. Once you realise this, and do the sums, it just doesn’t add up.

Today I noticed a PPC ad for our brand that I didn’t recognise, mainly as the spelling on it was awful. The ad was from an affiliate, one who we had paid a large amount of commission to over the past 2 to 3 months. This was the final straw. When I spoke to Affiliate Window, they didn’t seem surpirsed, or particularly concerned that an affiliate was stealing our money, infact, the affiliate was already suspected of doing the same to other merchants. If this was the case, why were they not stopped, would it be because the network was complicit in stealing our commision? They afterall get their 30% anyway.

The networks are making a LOT of money out of affiliate marketing, they need to police their affiliates effectively. It’s kinda like the banking situation at the moment. It’s OK making dodgy loans for a while, but in the end they come back and bite you. If the networks continue to allow dodgy affiliates to prosper, they may well find that in a few months/years it will come back and bite them.

2. Taking your programme in-house is a very big step. How important is Affiliate Marketing to your business at the moment. What future do you see for Blushing Buyer in the affiliate marketing sphere?
It is a big step, but for us affiliate marketing is only a very small part of our marketing mix, especially when we take the dodgy commisions out. we would rather have a handful of affiliates such as yourself, who can generate us genuine new customers, than 10000 affiliates who either do nothing, or worse steal from us.

I don’t ever see affiliate marketing becoming a major channel for us, but it is a great way of developing niches. There are genuine affiliates who do a great job, and we will continue to try to find those affiliates and try to work more closely with them. I can even see us working directly with voucher affiliates and cashback sites, but it needs to be done in a way where we see a proper return on our investment, and we retain an element of control. For example, if an affiliate can demonstrate that they can get our voucher code out to their 10000 strong mailing list, and we see some genuine sales from it, then I would be happy to work with them. Or if they use their SEO skills to promote a voucher for the products we sell, rather than using their SEO skills to leach customers who were going to buy from us anyway, then that helps us generate new business.

It’s about building relationships and trust, not something that is very prevelent within the network dominated market at present.