William Higgins' Affiliate Program a scam?

[GayGeek]

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

[gaybucks_chip]

I'll be interested to hear the excuse for this one Sounds like a scam through and through.

[Xstr8guy]

Well that is totally fucked up! I wouldn't bother to send one click to an affiliate program with multiple billers that doesn't have a cascading billing setup that credits you for all sales.

Surely a brand like William Higgins could afford the best billing system in the business. To me, this doesn't seem like a deliberate scam. It's more likely that they just don't have a clue how to run an affiliate program, they just don't need an affiliate program or they just don't care.

These are exactly the type of people that NEED to attend webmaster conferences. Dummies.

[Dzinerbear]

I do get the odd sale from William Higgins, but not a lot. The above information is very revealing.

Another reason for poor sales could be that his content is available virtually everywhere as the Prague Buddies plugin. So why should a surfer become a member of his site when they get to see a great deal of it already?

Cheers
Michael

[basschick]

yeah, but if there's 4 billers, figure you are getting 1/4 of your actual sales - plus the other issue, so maybe even less.

I do get the odd sale from William Higgins, but not a lot. The above information is very revealing.

Another reason for poor sales could be that his content is available virtually everywhere as the Prague Buddies plugin. So why should a surfer become a member of his site when they get to see a great deal of it already?

Cheers
Michael

[robin]

Pfffffffft! That reminds me its time to take his listing and banners off one of my sites.

[desslock]

Perhaps it was intentional. Perhaps not. Unfortunately such a case ends up being a He said / She said fight.

Thank you, Gay Geek for posting this. Every couple of months I run across anomolies in the statistics reporting of the sites I promote. Often, I've been able to compare notes with other friends on here, and take my case to the company.

In all of the my sitiuations, I believe it was due to human error. SNAFUs.... or FUBAR if you wanna call it that....

These reporting systems, particularly with tracking going through a third party, and with everyone making changes all the time in their sites and code - it is easy for stuff to get screwed up.

And I have made test purchases from suspect websites just to verify tracking. I suggest to any serious affiliate to put a little money aside for this purpose in their budget just as a legitimate accounting expense.

I think the entire purpose and communication about affiliate programs is widely misunderstood by website publishers, billing companies... everyone across the board. And with some websites it's obviously not a priority.

I never promoted William Higgins, mainly because they were non responsive to my emails for movies. That was one of several "red flags" I got from looking at that site.

Steve

[basschick]

i don't need to make a test purchase to determine if a site with 4 processors on the page of which i can't receive credit for 3 is fucking me around. i know in advance they are not interested in doing what's good for affiliates - whether because of thoughtlessness or just plain greed.

[Dzinerbear]

basschick,

Thanks for sussing out the four processor thing. I never even noticed it. I always wondered why the traffic on my uncut Euro site didn't convert very well with a Czech website. Now I know.

Michael