Ocean Finance Join Numpties Not-So-Anonymous

Do you have to have an IQ test to become an affiliate manager these days?

Thanks to Keith on the A4UForum he's made us all aware of the Ocean Finance Affiliate T&C's which read:

“ZERO TOLERANCE for any web pages appearing in natural listings via the Ocean brand or derivates thereof “

You're kidding me right? Even if I were a finance affiliate I'd not be allowed to build pages promoting your offering? I'd not be allowed to casually build a paragraph or create an imaginitively crafted link like "Ocean Finance"?

You've really got to be chronically anal about your brand if people can't even mention it.

Michael Anthony even commented:

One of our memebers even had an email from Ocean's PPC company asking him to stop bidding on any terms including the word "Finance"!

Elena at TD then replied that Ocean had ammended their T&C's to:

ZERO TOLERANCE for any web pages appearing in natural listings via the Ocean brand or derivates thereof (logo images are available and must be used)

So now you can create copy around them but you can't mention their brand textually but you'll take the effort of putting a banner up.

I know it's not Elena's fault but she did make me chuckle when she remarked:

I believe what they are trying to avoid is having affiliates listed above themselves in the natural search results.

It's understandable why they're worried though! They don't even have "Ocean Finance" in their [Title] tag and they've got dodgy doorway pages linked to from their homepage.

I may even just take up finace affiliating to teach them a lesson.

Merchant Fraud Endemic In The Industry

I had a conversation last night with a fellow affiliate who has had a similar experience to the one I had with HMV and the Wii Console. The history of the matter is that it appears HMV continued to offer the Wii console on their site despite not having the stock to fullfill them. So many affiliates kept on promoting the product with them with no chance of earning a commission from those sales

This I can cope with - it's just a case of lack of communication and both the merchant and the network not managing their campaigns with what I call "due care and attention". For me this is a case where if we were valued, the network and merchant would say "fair enough, we ballsed up, here's some compensation to acknowledge that you've probably last a few £k because we didn't do our jobs properly".

There is one thing I can not stand and that's the plethora of merchants that are seemingly manipulating orders to avoid commissions.

I've got wind from this affiliate who had an email exchange with one of the buyers that one particular merchant continued to take Wii Orders without stock (fair enough!) but when they did have stock they called up the buyers and told them they had to put their order through on the phone, but not only that, if they didn't take out a 3 year product warranty they wouldn't be getting their Wii. This, in my mind, throws ethics straight out of the window in the affiliate sense, but surely is illegal in the wider sense?

Then the affiliate himself was called up and told that they couldn't put his order through unless the games he had with them.

So there's two issues:
The merchant following up existing web-orders to amend over the phone;
Forcing buyers to buy expensive 3 year warranties.

I'm shocked and appalled by this! There has to be more openness and we need to inform other affiliates of potential problems much earlier! Merchants that act in this manner should be removed from networks with due process. Affiliates should refuse to work with these merchants if they ever pop-up on another network.

I was going to post the emails that he forwarded to me, but we're awaiting official investigation from the network. I'd be very much inclined to report this matter to the Trading Standards and the press as it's absolutely outragous! But am I right to get this annoyed and incensed? What other tactics do we have to rid the industry of this sort of contempt for affiliates?

Big Companies Get E-Commerce So Wrong!

I'm pissed off at the moment!! I ordered my mum Mother's Day flowers from Tesco Direct as she likes the company and who am I to risk getting my mum flowers from a company that I don't trust to get it right?

Well, how wrong could I be. Tesco Direct pride themselves on their customer service, but they got it very wrong this time. If it's one group of their customers they can't disappoint it's mothers!

The flowers never got delivered on the day I set, they haven't got back to me with a reason and their telephone support is woefully inadequate!

So what should huge retailers offer in the way of customer service? Well here's my little bit of advice:

1) Don't make your customers wait 15 minutes and still not take their customer service query - I may be wanting to spend more money with you!

2) If you give a customer support email address make sure you get back to your customers within 24 hours! Great company's get back even sooner.

3) Predict Issues - how simple is it for a report to be created showing "Orders by date" | "Dispatched?" - it's not. The product I bought was "Mother's Day Flowers" - that's what you called it - make sure all of your products about Mother's Day are delivered before!

4) Keep your promises - it was a condition of my purchase that they were delivered on the day. At the moment Tesco is in breach of contract!

5) Communicate with your customers - I don't mean the constant drivel of marketing messages - speak to us!

6) Be accountable for your, or your supplier's actions. If you've dropped a bollock, apologise.

7) Value your customers, say sorry with vouchers, better flowers.

So even big companies can learn lessons. The points I set out above are so obvious it makes me cringe that they've not been implemented.

Will I get my money back, will I be able to make it up to my mum? I doubt it. Companies these days are so adept at hiding behind T&C's that consumers are shafted all the time.

Will I used Tesco Direct for my Girlfriends flowers, my mum's, Christmas, Valentine's Day? Will I pop in for petrol or last-minute shopping? No - not until I've had an apology and to feel valued!

Nick Robinson - ASOS Numpty?

NMA has reportedly quoted the CEO of ASOS (the celebrity fashion retail site) as saying:

"Next year we'll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were" said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. "(There'll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales"

Now with affiliates being really sensitive to people bounding around the perception that we're spotty geeks sat in our bedrooms knocking out sites, it really suprising that someone that's been voted as in the top 50 of UK Entrepreneurs making a comment that is so stupid and detrimental to his business as this!

I'm sure there'll be many full time, very financially successful, industry players that will be hell-bent to bring ASOS to it's affiliate knees.

I'm also sure that many networks will be very wary of working with a merchant that appears so clueless as to what affiliate marketing is. Any network that does choose to work with them will spend the majority of their time trying to educate ASOS rather than growing their business - well so I think!

Any affiliate manager that chooses to work for ASOS must be a glutton for punishment. Why would anyone want to work for someone that is so anti their industry that they'd make a comment like that?!

Fraud on the other foot?

Is it me, or has the perception of affiliate fraud changed?

When I first started in this industry a few years ago everyone was saying that affiliate marketing was doomed because of affiliates fraudulently sending through leads that were false.

You had the perception that there were hundreds of spoty teenagers running incentivised sites putting false data or completely irrelvant leads through credit card, loans and other merchants - and taking a pretty nice sum for it.

For me it wasn't a perception, I knew people that completely ignored any sense of morals. I won't name the person in my mind, but I'm sure everyone will think of one person or another.

But now, I'm really worried about another type of fraud. I know I've got to be careful naming companies but for me virtually every affiliate could name transactions that just disapear.

Previously we've blamed people having cookies turned off, other affiliates over-writing the cookies with adware, network tracking being broken, mal-formed links, merchants deleting tracking code by mistake etc.

Today, I'm extremely worried about merchants illegimately rejecting legitimate sales as "fraudulant orders", "credit card not validated", "incorrect contact details" etc when in actual fact there's nothing wrong with the order.

In certain industries, such as consumer electronics and mobile phones we expect a percentage of orders to be rejected. But we never expect our own orders to rejected when the products have actually been recieved or dispatched.

I say this because I recently ordered a PC with Dell (on Tradedoubler) and the order I put through on the 16th Feb was in effect cancelled and a new one created on the 18th. I never recieved any notification or explanation from Dell saying why this happened. And I can't think of any reason why it would be.

I'm not saying it was an attempt to prevent affiliate commission being paid on the order. But with the current climate of suspission every merchant should attempt to be as transparent as possible.

Take for example Advanced MP3 Players. I had a shed load of rejections in one day - a few hundred quid. I contacted them and Josh got back giving me a full rundown of what happened and I was happy with that.

You've also got a possible problem with Currys where it has been mooted that the order was cancelled and then put back on with the telephone customer service's details against the sale. I personaly knew someone that worked as a GUS/Argos customer service person in Widnes and they frequently "have to" cancel web orders and put them back through over the phone. The conversation I had with them was about 3 years ago so I don't know the current situation, but I'm sure this is a massive problem for the affiliate industry.

It's about time the networks provided a thorough solution to this. Some merchants offer lifetime commissions based on an individuals account. To implement a solution will mean that merchants would have to update their backend systems to provide a solution whereby any sale from a particular name/address within a given time will garner affiliate commission.

There has to be a solution before the industry is destroyed, not by the unscrupulous, spotty oiks with an overactive desire to be rich; but by merchants that either have an unhealthy desire to meet "targets" or by the niave one's that don't think long term and don't think affiliates can collectively bring a merchant to it's knees.

It can and will happen if merchants don't buck up their ideas and play the game properly.

What I'm listening to: Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot! ;-)

Mechants: Not Thinking Like Customers (Annoyance #3)

So I bought myself a nice new Wii Console last year and signed up with the Swap Game Affiliate Programme on Paid on Results.

I go and order my first two games, GT Pro Series (rubbish) and Red Steel (not bad). I play them for a bit and sent them back just after Christmas. Now I've been waiting nearly a month to get some more games to come back. But they never arrive. So I email them and say that I've sent them back but nothing's come my way. Then they reply with:

Hi Lee,

We have not received these titles back from you, could you please forward your certificate of posting to us so we can remove these games from your list.

Kind regards
[witheld]
Customer Care Support
address: Swapgame.com Ltd, Coventry, UK

Are you kidding me? I'm supposed to get a certificate of posting from the Post Office every time I'm sending back a game??? You've got to be kidding me?!!

I'm still waiting for a reply but if it's not satisfactory, I'll be emailing my Wii Console and PS3 subscribers telling them to avoid SwapGame.

In fact, GameFlirt on Affiliate Future have been great, asking for advice and feedback. So if you're looking to promote a games rental company, go for GameFlirt!

Merchants - Don't Use URL's with "Affiliate In" (Annoyance #2)

One thing that does my tits in is merchants that have landing pages or redirects with "affiliate" in the URL.

Many affiliates spend time hiding the fact that links are of the affiliate variety by using redirects and forcing the text in the status bar - so the last thing we want is to let it be known to all and sundry that we're gonna earn a few quid from your sale.

The one that tipped me over the edge was Curry's. Today I've been looking for a new microwave and popped into Comet and saw a nice Samsung one, it looked quite neat, but being an affiliate I wanted some commission on it so was going to buy online. Comet didn't have it on their site so I started looking around for other suppliers. I went to comparestoreprices.co.uk and found it.

I knew Chris encrypts his links so I looked at the address bar and was horrified to find:




What's wrong with these guys? Can't they just rename the redirect AR.asp ?

So if anyone else knows of merchants that do this, or have actual final landing pages with "Affiliate" in, please let me know?

Also if you know of a better microwave than the Samsung BCE1197B, let me know!

Merchants: Keep your site updated (Annoyance #1)

Show me some love!

I'm creating a new site for ppc (Cheap Valentines) - it's nothing great and I'm just doing bits here and there.

I started it before Christmas sometime just to get the framework done so after the new year I could start off easily.

Beforehand I added a page about flowers - pretty damn obvious product. Fair enough, I didn't expect any flower merchant to have valentines products up as the market is still focused on Christmas Flowers.

Now it's a week into the new year, Valentines day is just about five weeks away. I move on to doing the chocolate section - again a no-brainer! And how many merchants have Valentines pages ready? Chuff all!

What makes it worse is that three of the big players, still have Christmas promotions and no products squarly focused at Valentines Day:

1) http://www.hotelchocolat.co.uk/ - "Chocolate Christmas & New Year Gifts"
2) http://www.cadburygiftsdirect.co.uk/ - "christmas santa"
3) http://www.chocolatetradingco.com/ - "The Christmas Chocolate Hamper"

I'm just glad that there are some merchants that are forward thinking! I contacted PrezzyBox (tips hat to Zak) before Christmas and they had some creatives ready on Awin. And after I posted on the A4U Forum other merchants have added their offerings:

So here's who you should be promoting:

1) PrezzyBox - (Affiliate Window) - Zak Edwards
2) JustHom (Affiliate Future) - Love Me Briefs - Adam Davies
3) BuyCheapCondoms - Valentines Specials - Jayne Lock, Marketing Manager (Affiliate Future)

Sales are already coming through (slowly however).