Hey folks,
I run GayGeek, a website that reviews gay websites. I've let it kinda lag for the past year but picked it up again a few weeks ago and have been running with it. In doing so, I noticed that William Higgins, our #2 ranked site, has converted very poorly. I mean VERY poorly, to the tune of ZERO cents per click. This struck me as odd, as both our #1 and #3 sites have done rather well.
In investigating the issue I discovered that during the prior year we had sent them several thousand clicks not one of which had converted into a sale. One of my friends had deliberately signed up on Wlliam Higgins' site via his affiliate program, so we didn't understand why it didn't reflect at least one sale.
I asked around to a number of webmasters that were dealing with William Higgins. Not many wrote back, but those that did said that they had similar experiences with the site. I notice DzinerBear here on GWW posted in 2004 that he tried working with WH's affiliate program and it hadn't worked for him either.
Now we knew that WH would never convert all that well, as we send traffic to him via the Verotel affiliate program yet he has four different signup systems (CCbill, Verotel, and two others). So we'd only be getting credit for the Verotel ones. But no sales on thousands of clicks? That couldn't be right.
We contacted Verotel and asked them to look into the issue. I have copied their response below which they sent out today.
What I'm wondering is this: Is there any possible way that William Higgins was not trying to cheat their affiliates? The extra line of code he had doesn't seem like something that can get there by accident. And their sales reports in the past year would have shown that they didn't lose a dime of affiliate income via Verotel since they put the code in place.
I also wanted to make other webmasters aware of what I believe is a deliberate attempt to defraud affiliates. It's bad enough that he's using four payment processors only one of which will pay affilaite income, but to take even that small amount of money away from affiliates? That's totally unwarranted.
Thoughts?
--Aaron
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fwd: Reseller Control Center
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:23:57 +0200
From: Merchant Support <merchantsupport@verotel.com>
To: william@wh.cz
Dear merchant,
We received a complaint from this reseller, regarding him not getting any sales for your website. I checked to see what's wrong with your join page and it appears that the HTML code you use for your site cancels the reseller cookie for the transaction.
The code in your join button says this:
<input type=hidden name=verotel_resellerid
value="">
Which actually means that our system doesn't check the cookie on the customer's computer. Could you please remove this line so resellers are able to receive credits for their traffic.
Thank you,
Joris
Merchant support
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