Grim Realities about Product Launches

A lot depends on the vendor and the product.

Also, you have to be very careful who you allow to promote as an affiliate.

It shows how UNprepared many are.

Now, consider the approach, many do a soft launch, to see what may happen before full roll out, to make sure all ducks are in a row. Sometimes this is 90 days out from full product launch.

A soft launch is used in retail to have a shake down of the store and give new employees a chance to experience what the store is like before the GRAND OPENING.

I would encourage you to do a test first, before you encounter all the problems, and everything you mentioned can and does happen. Of course, it depends on your market and niche and what your offer is.

But there are many "back room" headaches which could arise during a full out launch, so, again...try a test or soft launch first and gather those testimonials too.

gjabiz

I have considered problems like these which did halt the idea of creating my own product also. At the same time, I kind of feel like this has to happen for the business model to arise. There's a certain amount of steps we have to get over before we see success and in the niche of product launching, that is definitely present.

However, we don't know the future though. For all we know, all of the negativity you just spoke of might not even happen, or not yet at least.

I guess at this point it's just a matter of testing, kind of like what the poster above me said.

p.s. Keep in mind, there's a good bunch of marketers making BANK off this forum and a VERY good amount of marketers making SUPER BANK in niches unrelated to this forum outside of this forum. So if I were you, I would not knock product launching yet...

If you have a top quality product that is priced right to the point that customers feel they got a great product for their money, you will not have too many problems on the financial side. At least in my experience, anyway. I've done a couple of launches. Some did good and some flopped.

The main problem I experienced on the financial/payment processing end was with affiliate fraud. I was unprepared on my first product launch and was new to JVZoo and I allowed any affiliate that applied to promote for instant commissions. I had only ever listed my products on RapBank prior to this, as JVZoo was brand new. I was used to the system they had where every affiliate automatically got instant commissions. Big mistake.

I approved an affiliate who immediately started making a lot of sales. They were paid instantly for their sales and then about a week or two later I started to get a lot of chargebacks coming in. They were all from sales this one affiliate made. I tried to recover the commissions but was unable to. I had no choice but to refund the purchase fee out of my pocket and also pay a $20 chargeback fee for each chargeback. I was able to realize what happened and get ahead of it, but I still got hit for 5 or 6 chargebacks in total. That cost me around $300 out of my pocket when all was said and done.

This is a common credit card scam that still gets pulled today. The "affiliate" uses stolen credit card numbers to purchase your product under their affiliate link. You then pay them instantly and after they have "sold" a bunch of your products, they empty their accounts and by the time the real cardholder finds out and files a chargeback the scammers are long gone with the money.

A vendor can easily avoid this by not allowing anybody they don't know to get instant commissions. Also, your product price and commission percentage can play a role in this. Scammers will normally only go after higher priced products. If you've got a $10 product that pays 50% on the FE then you are probably safe, but still anything could happen.

So, I would say that one of the most important things you can do for your launch is to make sure you know who is promoting your product. If you are unsure you can ask them for more information or even put them on delayed for the first 10 sales and if all is well after a week or two you can then move them to instant.

As far as refund issues go, my policy is to always grant the refunds no matter what reason they give. In fact, unless they even volunteer a reason I don't even ask. I just thank them for giving the product a try and wish them luck. This way you can leave on good terms with them and possibly they will buy from you in the future. If they were just trying to get the product for free then good for them they got a free digital product. I don't let that type of thing bother me. A good refund policy also helps to keep the number of disputes way down. If you do this part right then you should not have issues with too many disputes. That is, unless your product does not deliver and people get upset. Usually a good product and a lenient refund policy will protect you from having issues with disputes.

I will admit that I hate when my stuff gets shared on the black hat and free download forums, but over the years I've learned to accept that it's going to happen. If you think about it, there really is no defense against it. Sure, you can password protect your members area or download page, but then someone will buy the product just to share it and they will share their login details with the forum. I suppose you would be able to see a lot of different IPs logging in with the same user name, but by that time if you have downloadable files those have been shared all over the place too. That's a tough one to protect against. I've never been 100% successful at stopping it.

Anyway, here is a little trick I use to seek out good affiliates on JVZoo & Warrior Plus:

1. Look at the top sellers board and check out the affiliate pages for each of the top selling products.

2. Check the affiliate info pages to see if there is an "Affiliate Contest" button. If it's there click it and if it's not check and see if they have their own JV page. Sometimes they run contests and list the details there and not on the affiliate details page.

3. If they are having an affiliate contest, there should be a list of the top 10 or 20 affiliates for the product. Grab those names and make a list.

4. Head over to Facebook and search for the names on your list. There might be more than one person with that name but you can usually spot who the affiliate is by their interests or posts they make.

5. Send that person a friend request and a short message describing why you contacted them. This has to be done right. Don't just say "Hey I'm such and such want to promote my product?" That probably won't work. You may want to engage in a little small talk first and get to know the person a bit. Then you can discuss your launch, offer them a review copy, and ask them if they would like to promote your product. Remember, if they are a top affiliate they have their pick of hundreds of products they could promote so you need to make your offer attractive to them. Things that help in this area are offering them a custom commission and having some nice affiliate tools they can use like swipes, banners, articles, videos, etc.

If you do this right you can get lots of top affiliates to promote your product. I have hauled in a few big time affiliates with that method.

Well good luck with your launch!

launches work great when done properly. mine have all been internal/seed or with 1-2 trusted colleagues only. I haven't trusted external total-stranger affiliates due to cb/refund fraud concerns.

Geez, I'm glad I chose to not go with an affiliate program. Seems like a giant headache!

As for the 'product launch formula', I never liked the 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine' mentality that goes along with it. No, I want you to promote my product if it's something your customers will actually find of value, not because I promoted your product to my list, and vise versa.

I will try to give you a solution for every problem you listed.

This happens when you have a bad product. The refund rate is usually high on ebooks. Unless there is valuable information there, the refund rate estimated is around 20%. Yes, if the product is not solid, you should be looking at more. This happens when you write a book just to sell it.

If you have a software or any other product, things are better. Refund rates should be under 5%, and you can find ways to maybe limit the usage if someone asks for a refund. If people bother to crack your software then your software is a success and that fact won't cut your sales.

(2) People open a dispute via PayPal to get their refund, which means we can't charge back the affiliate or JVZoo and lose money on the refund

Well, a lot of people will disagree here, but the system behind jvzoo is a big problem for any seller. The problem is that when a sale is made, the affiliate paypal is instantly credited. If a buyer asks for a refund then you pay all the money. It is hard to take money back from the affiliate. As a solution, don't use Jvzoo.

Affiliates can make false sales just to take your money. The system can be exploited in many ways.

(3) Too many PayPal disputes lead to issues with PayPal and them putting restrictions/freezing your account

Build a better product. If the transactions are real ( no frauders involved ), then you should not have that many disputes, unless the product is real bad.

(4) Charge back scam or "friendly fraud", where the buyer charges back via their credit card. This means we lose our product, the purchase price, the commission paid to the affiliate, and then pay a charge back fee.

As I said, try other system to launch your product.

(6) Overzealous affiliates promising your product does more than it can which leads to angry customers and more refunds; similarly, affiliates don't deliver on their bonuses and the customers expect them from you.

Try to find affiliates elsewhere.

(7) Expense of affiliates: in the author's example, his $500k in sales resulted in him keeping $72k, or just 15%.

$72k for 10 hour a day support for 3 days seems a lot of money to me. How many hours he spent on developing the product. If he spent less than 1 year then he is on good profit.

With numbers like these, heck yeah. I'd put my niece and nephew to work on the support end. Even my sister. Somebody gonna help if they see my stats like this.

The main problems in your post seem to revolve around affiliates. Take it slow and approve affiliates you can trust. Also, use payout times to protect yourself, the majority of big companies enforce a long duration before you are paid anything for these reasons.

Randall seems to have noted the part that caught my eye too. 1000 customers a day on a new product launch! At that point, you could probably hire in some support staff to help you out.

people do ask for refunds even without going through an affiliate. If you have a quality product, the refund percentage should be minimal, but you will still have some. At first I tend to get annoyed, thinking that someone bought the product just to essentially get it for free (after refund), but now I just let go of the idea and refund them anyway. i'm guessing maybe 5 to 10 percent (closer to 5) on the refunds, but ymmv.

I think you need to assess carefully the products you sell to can someone help promptly , avoiding annoying customers ...

Expense of Affiliates: It's up to you on that. To get some of the better affiliates you might have to pay 75% or even 100% commissions, but the trade-off is that you build a list of buyers from the customers they send you.

I know several sellers who give 100% to just about all affiliates (at least for the Front-end offer), because they want that list of buyers, which is more valuable long term.

Customer Support: If you have a buggy product, yeah - you'll be in for a ride.

Plus it depends more on what you are selling: Software sales will give you the most customer support headaches, especially complex plugins that are likely to conflict with other plugins the customer has installed.

But ebooks and video? Nah, not much customer support issues there, but you'll have some buyers contact support about access issues (can't find their login or download page) and file download issues (they can't unzip large files on their system or slow Internet preventing them from completing downloads, etc..,)

There are cons to any business you get into. Deal with them or get out of the game.