So you think you'd like to have affiliates promoting your product? Hmmm ... Maybe not.

That's why commissions don't lock for 30-60 days at the major affiliate networks -- to allow them to be voided in the event of returns, cancellations and fraud. I manage around 2000 active affiliates for my products and have to review every transaction every month for that kind of thing.

They'll also bid against you for your brand/product name in search engines no matter how many times you tell them it's not allowed by the program. Anything to intercept a sale that's really already committed.

I can't be sure but I'd bet the affiliates and the buyers are working together. What they're really after is your product. The only way they can get away with this is the unauthorized transaction trick.

The instant affiliate payment method is truly not 100% safe for vendors. Also considering the fact it is paypal involved here.

Holding payment for certain amount of days to weeks should done to help cater for charge backs and refunds. You should use clickbank for your payments because it is highly efficient for this and you can also receive payment via paypal.

Just an update: I found all five transactions in Paypal where I sent the commissions to those scam artist affiliates and disputed all 5. What goes around, comes around... especially the guy who was responsible for 4 sales and 2 chargebacks and 2 refunds in my Paypal account ...now he has 4 open disputes to deal with and I described exactly what was going in in the disputes.

What really pisses me off is that 4 chargebacks in 4 days is more chargebacks than I've ever had in all the years that I've had a Paypal account. It really makes me rethink the whole affiliate thing.

Was it worth it? No. Most of the sales came from me. The affiliate sales were a small portion of the total sales and 1/3 of the affiliate sales from one platform were fraudulent. Obviously, if you have super-affiliates promoting your products honestly, it's going to be profitable, but for the average seller who does not have super-affiliates promoting, joining these affiliate platforms just for the affiliates hasn't been worth the trouble it has caused in my Paypal account. The amount of traffic and sales they have sent has been really minimal.

Anyone else have a different experience with affiliates on either of those platforms?

Good post, agreed - you need to know or at least have some idea about how the person is going to promote. If in doubt you can ask to see the email/website they will be using to promote and instant commissions is only good for people you trust.

I'm a huge fan of great affiliate marketers, but in my own experience, I've also run into this:
Quick-n-dirty affiliates often want to promote their links to your product. Not your actual product. Their goal can be to SEO their way to the top of the rankings, ahead of your own, or very close to it, for keywords like "'your product' coupon".

I've even got affiliates on this very forum (gasp) competing with my own WSO with their classified ad. And when I've explained that's against the affiliate TOS, they've acted completely dumbfounded. But how else am I supposed to market your product?

The solution is to seek out jv's and affiliates yourself, and vet them. Only find affiliates who care deeply about your product, and also to only offer discounts on a temporary basis.

Also, we process our own payments and use Authorize.net with some pretty hefty fraud settings turned up, and we call every customer. If we can't reach them within a week, we refund the money ourselves.

Hope this helps.

Seth

Well, just heard back from Paypal on the 4 disputes I made on the one affiliate scammer and naturally, I lost all four, so that's $200 paid to him for scamming me that he gets to keep in addition to the 2 refunds and 2 chargebacks from his transactions, costing me an additional $400... and then there's another $150 that I'll most likely lose through Paypal to the other affiliate so .... total lost to scam affiliates on this platform = $500.

So much for sitting back and letting affiliates do the work for you. That can get pretty expensive. Now that I've lost the Paypal battle, I won't be using affiliates any longer.

As the owner of one of the biggest instant pay affiliate networks (although we're not as big on WF as W+ and JVZoo) I feel I should weigh in on this one.

First off, let's deal with this misnomer -

They're really not. If someone wants the product without paying, they'll torrent/blackhat it or just plain buy and refund. Committing affiliate fraud just to get the product really isn't worth the hassle compared to the other options.

So why are they doing it?

Money, plain and simple.

The affiliate gets stolen credit card info and opens a new PayPal account. He registers for an affiliate account with the PayPal account and uses the stolen credit card to make a purchase. The result is the PayPal account gets paid the commission, which he then cashes out to a bank account and closes the PayPal account, leaving the vendor on the hook for the full amount when the owner of the credit card discovers the fraud and issues a chargeback.

What can you do about it?

One option, as Suzanne has gone for, is to just not allow affiliates to promote your product. If you're not planning to actively engage in running your affiliate program, engaging with affiliates and so forth then this is definitely the best option.

There's a myth that you can just list a product on an affiliate network and 100s of people will drive traffic to your sales page, making you tons of sales. The truth of the matter is, it just doesn't work this way. The people making it work are ... drum roll please ... working at it.

You need to get out there and get affiliates to check out your product. You need to prove to them that it's worth promoting. You need to stay in touch with them to make sure they don't get bored and start promoting something else instead.

But for anyone that does want the small amount of exposure that a network can offer just by listing it and doing no active recruitment work then you still have to put the time and effort into vetting your affiliates. At the very least, don't approve people you don't know to instant commission, set everyone to a 30 day delay.

The problem with that is the legit affiliates expect to be paid instantly, it's the done thing now. So setting those guys to a 30 day delay means the few you may pick up just from listing will probably promote someone else that does approve them to instant.

Cliff notes

Managing an affiliate program takes work. Don't buy into the myth that you can just list a product and make a ton of sales. If you want to open up the affiliate channel, expect to put time and effort into it like any other marketing channel.

or better...just use clickbank?

Hi,

Sorry to hear that. It sucks, but you have to do a 30-60 day period depending on your refund policy otherwise you already know what happens.

Two ways that people pump through these junk sales are:

1. in extreme cases, using stolen credit card info
2. more commonly, tacking on the sales to other transactions and/or spamming enormous lists (think: make money at home) to see who bites. A lot of the people that end up buying are so confused at what is going on and being hammered with 50 offers a day that they get fed up and chargeback all their recent transactions.

A few good affiliates are better than an army of junk/spammy ones.

jeez!!! learned something new today.

I'm sorry to hear about this, I will consider my options carefully when I launch a product. Can you set the commission period to whatever you like on W+? I thought it was an instant commission platform. I presume the same thing happens over at RapBank as well?

People only get credit card statements in the mail once a month. They usually don't read them immediately. If they notice a fraudulent charge, it takes another 1-5 BANKING days for the chargeback to get from their bank, to one of PayPal's underwriting banks (Wells Fargo and Chase), into PayPal's system and into your e-mail.

So really the minimum lock period for commissions has to be 45-60 days if you want to be able to reverse most commissions earned with stolen credit cards. That's why the major networks that work with large companies pay every 30 days... but it's two months ago's commissions they're paying out.

I had exactly the same problem. I did one WSO which had a less than 1% refund rate, no issues, fairly low price. I had a follow up product (more expensive) and got quite a few of these chargeback issues where people (probably the real credit card holder) disputed the transaction - result was over $400 lost and it really pissed me off.

Now I don't set instant payment to ANY affiliate bar two that are very well known on here and I know from past experience they are trustworthy. Everyone else gets delayed payment.

I just totalled up total number of affiliates - over 200. The number that made sales - just 25 and most of them were single sales. 90% of the affiliate sales were done by just 6 affiliates.

Moral? Most affiliates are a complete waste of time and effort.

I'm just thinking out loud...

...if only a small percentage of affiliates actually make any sales...
it stands to reason that the ones who do are experienced and are not so desperate that they 'need' to be paid immediately...

...so I don't think those few really good affiliates that you actually want would be detered by the delay in payment...

...and those who want the instant payment are probably the ones you want to weed out anyways...

...so I'm sort of thinking that there just doesn't seem to be any good argument for instant payments anyways...

thoughts????

My opinion, if you don't trust them enough to do instant payments, don't approve them at all.

Also, again in my opinion joining the platforms like JVZoo, etc. is not usually to just attract random affiliates who may want to promote, as those are not the ones you want. The affiliates you want, you need to go and ask them to promote for you.

My two cents. I don't approve anyone unless I'm sure about them, completely.

Your view of what affiliates find acceptable seems skewed.

All of Amazon.com's several hundred thousand affiliates get paid no earlier than 60 days after the sale.

63% of the largest online retailers in the world run their program on Commission Junction; all those affiliates get paid 45-60 days later at earliest.

2,500 merchants run their programs through ShareASale, which pays out approx. 50 days after the sale (and can be longer depending on the merchant).

Go anywhere the largest non-bizopp affiliate programs in the world are, and the payouts are delayed 45-60 days. And they have more affiliates than any IM product.

Have you had a chat with JVZoo or W+ to discuss why there was failure in having commissions on refunds returned to your account? And of course to discuss banning the affiliate?

.

Wow Suzanne that sucks. I would like to assume that you created a killer $97 product. Any response/feedback as to why the chargebacks and refunds were like so?

They warn you at JVZOO not to give instant commissions unless you know and trust the affiliate.

So it would seem that one strategy might be, using Warrior Plus, run a successful WSO and approve no affiliates. Make such a great offer it gets Mike Lance's attention and he makes it WSO of the day.

He's really the only affiliate you need.

Of course being WSO of the day might attract some well known affiliates.

George Wright

Never approve affiliates you don't know.

Honestly sbucciarel I feel so bad for you, your a great member and do not deserve this. You help out members constantly on here, it's always the nice members that this BS happens to. Not that anyone deserves it of course.

This has really highlighted some red flags for me now, at the very least you have helped out some of us by educating people, so out of all the crap you have still managed to help others.

We will not forget that sbucciarel, please don't let it get you down to much.

I agree with you. When putting my first product on JVzoo I was psyched when getting affiliate requests - then saw a pattern...I would get a request to accept a new affiliate and then within 30 minutes would get one purchase from another email address. And that was the last I heard from the affiliate. Just an easy way to get a product at a deep discount. Getting to the point where I don't accept affiliates unless I know them through a more direct route. Another reason to 'get out there' and meet people instead of relying on online methods.

Whats other people experiences of best ways to make affiliate relationships?

MM

Wow, i'm sorry to hear this Suzanne this is a lesson to me as well.

I was also a newbie in approving affiliates and I ran my recent WSO through Warrior Plus and initially accepted anyone that came along, but over time stopped this and got very selective.

This puts me even more on the alert for the future.

Joel

This has brought some perspective to what i was initially thinking. Although I don't use affiliates for my direct response campaign (its a physical product)

I do have an info product in mind and thought I would use affiliates for that...but now after reading this, I see When i create it and go to sell it, I will have to be very cautious if using affiliates.

I think I will not offer instant commissions...If this gives me limited affiliates, so be it..I understand that 80 percent of my sales will come from 20 percent of my affiliates..so its quality over quantity thinking here

I wonder if there is a way to carefully vet out out the potential affiliates before you even launch? Setting it up before hand? Is the only way by soliciting them personally?

so many chargebacks to your Paypal account .. thanks for heads up dude .. I had some products and was searching a way to sell them. This helps allot for newer like me .

Suzanne,

I think (whether you are aware of it, or not) you have built some good relationships here on the WF. That's where you need to start when recruiting affiliates.

Wow. Lots of valuable information throughout this thread.
It's opened my eyes to the seedy world of stolen credit cards and fraud.
Too bad these people who have been so creative in stealing money can't use those skills to create useful products and be entrepreneurs.

If someone can figure out a solution to all this and organize it and make sense of it all, it might make a valuable WSO (though I don't know if it would really sell -- people don't usually buy the stuff they really need, like this info, just what they want.)

Anyway, thanks for all the posts here.

Not sure if this was mentioned here already (too many walls of text to read), but this type of thing is pretty common in the world of underground carding (basically stealing ppls credit card info).

They simply use the victims cc info to purchase affiliate products and get "clean" money by way of commission. And guess who get's left holding the ball...


edit: Scott that's probably the best profile pic I've seen around these parts lol

wow, I need to read this thread over...quick lesson =scammers'- tactics evolving with Aff.marketing by the day!