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Unscrupulous merchants: Cautionary advise for affiliates

31-Aug-05 11:11:24 AM -0400 by Mofaz

I would like to share a bitter experience I went through recently being an affiliate. The lesson is, please investigate carefully what you are being paid for your marketing effort. It is not enough to rely on the information posted by merchant on the affiliate enrollment page. An interesting question to ask, what is the legal implication put on such page? Is there a statutory declaration that you will be paid such and such?. The majority of the information being given on such pages is very vague, e.g. : Affiliate will be paid a handsome 25% commission. And our sales figure for a purchase can be as high as USD100!

What does that tell you? Is it the average? Or is it the best case scenario? What if the main product, and the most popular they are truly promoting are just USD 5? Failing to consider this would result in severe resource taxation for those affiliates relying on paid advertisement.

The argument presented here so far is still does not pinpoint the final responsibility rests on the merchants, although ethical issues would make it strongly be as such. Affiliates themselves can be blamed for not doing a thorough research of the deal before embarking on a marketing activity.But what about outright misleading information by merchant? An example. (Now this is what actually happen to me):

"The price of our product is USD100, and affiliate get 25% for ever sale". So the affiliate start doing the maths; 'to break even, I can only spend USD25 in paid advertisement for one successful transaction. But when the statement comes, it shows that the affiliate  gets USD2.50 per transaction. Perplexed, the affiliate go to the merchant's actual website and realize the sale price is actually USD10 and NOT USD100! So when he contacted the the affiliate network program, they said it was a typo!  Well as far as the affiliate is concerned it could well be an intended typo! (In fact in my case, they wrote the USD100 'fact'  twice!

The next logical  the question to ask is, what is the legal status of the affiliate recruitment advertisements? Is it legally binding? People are throwing real money for marketing affiliates program, surely, there should be some legal requirement in this regard.

These are the issues affiliates program need to address. While there is no black and white guideline on the problem yet, affiliates would do well to conduct the due diligence in every program they are participating

Mofaz

For Beginners' guide to Internet Business, go to www.aziesha.com.

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