Merchant "tricks"

[rcjordan]

I saw a post by Brett re merchants using very lucrative pay-outs to entice publishers to code the site, then -once the links are established- greatly reducing the program. They know that some time-strapped publishers will leave the obsolete affiliate code in place, i.e., free links.

SSI, external js, or even IFRAMES offers a way to design in some central distribution of affiliate code.

[Drastic]

One of the merchant tricks that annoys me terribly, is the merchant pushing other affiliate programs to your visitor. Your user clicks through, and gets bombarded with a popup (or mulitple popups). And some even promote the other affiliate program as much as their own offerings. They earn from the "other" program, and give you nothing.

On the plus side, you can usually spot this by clicking your affiliate link and checking things out before you promote them.

[rcjordan]

>They earn from the "other" program, and give you nothing.

That's particularly sleazy in the CPA (leads) networks, but you'll also find quite a few of those "merchant bundlers" in the .01 CPC listings in the third-tier networks.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've seen a couple even go so far as to custom ip deliver excluding known member ips/hosts. They feed the popups to everyone else but you. I didn't know it was going on until users started to complain about the 3 popups. Everytime I looked I didn't see anything. Then went through a proxy server and sure enough, popups everywhere.

[Drastic]

Wow, Brett, that is nasty. I have wondered if they would actually do that a couple of times, but I figured they wouldn't go to the trouble. Guess it depends on how unscrupulous the merchant is.

To add to the list of tricks:
LinkShare merchants adjusting return days after you get comfortable with them. Explained in detail in this thread [webmasterworld.com].

[Drastic]

Branding - brought up by msgraph here [webmasterworld.com].

Not only do they milk branding from CPC campaigns, they are now doing so with CPA. Clickthroughs? Some of them don't care - they just want their graphics plastered on your page. Grabbing the mindshare, at the publisher's expense.