Forum Moderators: skibum
Now I have some better deals direct with merchants where I get my own 800 number extention, but for the majority of merchants I deal with the big affiliate networks (CJ and Linksare) and don't. I have to imagine I'm losing a percentage of sales due to this change.
Has anyone else noticed this, and tried to do anything about it?
Um, having trouble counting? Or did you not recognize the allusion to the third country?
I just started down the list of the world's largest countries, picking some with relatively high (and growing) technical expertise, very low per capita income, and economic systems inadequate to harness that technical expertise in honest enterprises. The same situation is already present, on a much smaller scale, in Eastern Europe (and its potential, on a smaller scale, in many countries).
I think there are (a) people who really try to be honest, (b) people who are honest so long as it's convenient, and (c) a few people who're always running a scam just for the thrill. Class "b" people might get co-opted into real jobs if they are available (as they often are in countries with healthy economies.)
And I agree with you about my native state, by the way. The class "c" folk not only in Florida but across the developable economies are already at work -- we can already see antisocial online behavior from Australia and Europe as well as North America.
The point is -- we AREN'T yet seeing proportional abuse from the rest of the world -- BUT WE ARE ABOUT TO!
It circumvents my commission, and if the seller is willing to do 'whatever' he needs to get sales, then let him do it somewhere else.
Banners take up alot of a room on sites, and that space needs to pay off. It is there to cover bandwidth cost, for the millions of page views we get, not to give free advertising to merchants who don't care about that fact that I have given them that space, to help them and me stay viable. It is a two way street, and from an affiliate point of view, it is a pretty dirty trick to do anything that will circumvent the commission.
We have enough problem getting our commissions that are trackable, let alone those that are untrackable. That is the main reason I am very selective in putting any affiliate banners on the site to begin with. I've been cheated out of more money that I know about, than I have earned.
I now have nearly all my affiliate banners on one page, that it is not heavily visited, to keep from losing real money from paying advertisers. I also will not work with an affiliate program that is not third party. The worst offenders are the those you work with directly. Not saying they all are, but it is a high percentage.
If they want to put the url and phone on the banner, it needs to be in a banner exchange, not on an affiliate publisher site.
As a consumer, I won't shop on any site that is not a 'public' company, and no phone number on a banner will change that. I do 90% of my shopping online, as I am at this keyboard 90% of the time, and if they aren't on a stock exchange, I don't shop there. Yes, I know that is very much contrary to my business model, but my personal life and business life are two different situations. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and help them out b2b, but won't spend a single consumer dime on them. Because I deal with thousands of businesses every day, I know how many o of them do business with consumers. I do have alot of really great clients, and if they were not clients, I 'might' them try them out on a small purchase, but I don't mix business with pleasure. Never buy from a client. If the consumer purchase goes south, so does the b2b relationship.
It was because I was tired of those trying to cheat me, I shut down our design business at the end of last year. I was tired of dealing with people who were constantly trying to cheat me. I kept the good clients, and quit taking new ones. Even after closing it down, a company begged me to help them, was relentless, and finally I caved in and decided to help them out. That company tried to cheat me more than any in our history. The biggest mistake of my life.
If they will try to cheat me, when I am giving them free services, what would they do to the consumer? I've seen so much of it, I protect my personal money.
I have considered this more from an affiliate manager perspective before, and thought that just creating a unique identifier that displayed below the phone number would be the best way. Training sales staff to ask the question right off would be the difficult part I owuld imagine.
Any merchants doing this exceptionally well? Please don't list them, but rather comment on what they are doing that makes it exceptional. For ambitious aff managers, is there any way to pull this off on a shoestring budget?
It's trust issue.
would it please the AM crowd if we had a site widgets.com for our regular business, and another with a very similar name like widgets.net for AM? And perhaps a dedicated 800 number (since they are so cheap these days) for the affiliate only site.
Um, having trouble counting? Or did you not recognize the allusion to the third country?
No. I counted the number of countries you had specifically named.
If you are not catching my allusion, let me state it more clearly:
There are more dollars lost by Americans to Americans than any other single nation.
Time for you to get your own house in order before casting aspersions at others.
Having the phone number on a banner, I clicked 20 minutes ago, before I browsed a site, and began loading my shopping cart, will not help me checkout.
That is an invalid excuse to cover affiliate fraud.
Having the phone number on a banner, that I clicked and then looked around your site to see if you have the products I want, and see if you look reputable, will also do me no good. I'm not going to use my back browse button to come back to that banner, when I can find it on your site. It is another invalid excuse for affiliate fraud.
The phone number on the banner is meant to get the customer to call, instead of clicking the link, plain and simple. That is the ONLY reason. If you work with affiliate accounts who do that, you are likely getting robbed. That is putting way too much trust in a system that has a long time history of fraud, and it is getting worst with every $29 website sold on shillbay having affiliate account setup incorporated into the site.
Stick with honest affiliate programs, third party monitored, and avoid banners that have urls or phone numbers on them. They offer the least amount of fraud, but are not fraud-proof.
Cheers
Chris
Paul
Affiliates benefit greatly from having a phone number displayed and the benefits of prominently displaying a customer service or sales number far outweighs the few, if any, sales that they lose to phone orders. On low to mid priced products, the odds are high that the customer will complete the order online and only wants to use the phone number if there is a problem with the order. How likely are you to order from a company who makes it impossible to find a contact number? How reputable are they if they hide their contact info? If there is a problem with the order, most people want it resolved right away and don't want to use online forms or email. But for placing orders, if you're already at the site it's easier to place the order there than to call someone up and potentially wait on hold or go through 5 automated prompts and have to read your info to someone.
In general, your conversion rate is dramatically improved when a phone number is displayed. It's worth losing maybe a couple sales to gain a lot more.
With that being said, we would never display our phone number on a banner or in a way that infers a user is better off ordering over the phone than online. In fact, why would anyone want to stop a customer entering the checkout process from completing their purchase and force them to take the extra step to pick up a phone and call someone. A good ecommerce site makes it as easy and streamlined as possible to remove all roadblocks to receiving an order.
In general, your conversion rate is dramatically improved when a phone number is displayed.
Absolutely true.
I can say with complete confidence that 99%+ sales still come online.
So could a current merchant of mine, who did not know better and their call center was trashing 85% of the phone calls I was sending.
I think this is a situation where Affiliates should employ "trust but verify". It is not always malice but ignorance that will cause you to lose sales through the merchants phone number, and it happens with and without tracking in place.
But if we did not have the 1-800 number prominently displayed the conversion rates would go down by more than that. Much more!
Affiliates who avoid sites with phone clear contact info are costing themsleves more than they are avoiding losing.
But yes there is an "Over the Line" like saying you MUST call for availability.
Look for merchant sites who apply the fundementals of good conversion.
A) Clearly Displayed Contact Information
B) Simple Checkout Pages
C) Accepting Many forms of Payment
D) Clean Simple design with obvious add to cart and shopping cart navigation
E) Good internal product search and categorization tools/presentation.
And the list goes on and on. These sites are going to convert at a higher rate, resulting in higher overall revenue for you.
The MERCHANT site has much more to do with your success in the affiliate program than your site does. Pick great merchants with great sites targeted at the consumer and you will be successful (more so anyway).
Could anyone elaborate on methods they've seen that were EFFECTIVE for tracking affiliate comissions via phone?
Here in the UK we have gone overboard with this for two clients and I think the results are pretty good. Here are the things we do:
Client 1:
1) The phone number itself (Not an extension, the whole number) is different on the screen when it is an affiliate link. This is picked up by the Caller Identification system on the call center. This means that from here on in, the sale HAS to be tracked to an affiliate. Now - true... it CAN go to a dummy affiliate code, but the point is that we have contained the error problem.
2) The affiliate ID is not only on the screen, but is also built into the PRODUCT CODE on the screen, so when a call center staff member asks for the holiday they user wants, the code is already there, and can only be entered in the source field on the call center's booking screen
3) The call center has now been through two training sessions, and they have a bottle of champagne in the office, which goes to the person that takes and closes the most affiliate deals each month.
4) The affiliate manager has to go and track down all calls assigned to the dummy affiliate code, to find their source, otherwise she loses the Kudos of the sale.
The down side of this is that the system has got so involved that the conversion data now resides on the company's internal systems, not the web based affiliate tracking system, meaning that the sales are not recorded in real time for the affiliate, but uploaded daily, but at least the internal booking system will then be able to audit any changes to the original booking - which most affiliate systems can't do.
Client 2:
With another client - this time where we are the affiliate not the merchant advisors - we have taken the whole thing away from the Merchant and not only built our own website, with their products, but we also have a phone number of our own on our site, which takes the user through to our own call center (not the client's). From here, we can complete the sale on behalf of the caller, still using the web - but obviously through our own affiliate link. Then we give the merchant HELL if the commission is not recorded. We can even record the phone conversation between the caller and the call center.
I think that an affiliate rejecting a program that has a phone number is being naive. I totally agree that most merchants are also being naive by having a phone number on the site that doesn't track, but the perfect solution HAS to be a phone number that reliably tracks.
Dixon.
Both Chris and Dixon have offered a number of options that will work - but the number one issue to tackle first is a true willingness of the merchant to address the problem. If the merchant is committed to it, the problem can be solved easily with technology and people. A merchant has to expect from their call center that they can handle the gathering of this information.
the number one issue to tackle first is a true willingness of the merchant to address the problem. If the merchant is committed to it, the problem can be solved easily with technology and people.
I absolutely agree S.A.S. But as an educated affiliate, you could take things into your own hands a little more than most affiliates seem to do i.m.h.o. - in these days of product feeds and cheap call center facilities, a good affiliate doesn't need to send the user to the merchant until the deal is pretty well done. I saw a piece of software the other day that looked up Easyjet fares online in realtime, marked every price up by £10 and did the whole online sale through a robot from his own site because he couldn't get an affiliate deal with Easyjet and wanted to compare prices with other (more enlightened?) carriers. That was pretty cool I thought... but he SHOULD have had his own phone number somewhere to increase conversions.
It's your own destiny affiliates - don't use a scorched earth policy with visitors to your site by sending them on to a program before you get what you can from your hard work acquiring the visitor.
There's even been offers made to me of up to £15 per person thatstays on the phone to a UK high street bank for 5 minutes or more, but these things have ultimately always proven to be just talk.
I's be interested to hear from any affiliate achieving higher ROI through site and phone number based tracking, or just phone based tracking, than through a non-phone "leakage" program.
Until I do, which I doubt, I think this thorny issue will remain one on which affiliates and merchants remain divided - the merchants want the number to grab every possible customer and the affs don't like them as they dent their ROI.
Just my 5 cents, and apologies if this has already been said above. I'm a bit lazy when reading here sometimes!
I have gone from generating no leads on a site that was reputable, but had a phone number in the middle, to generating 4-5 leads daily with another merchant. Stay away from merchants with their numbers displayed if they can't assure you that you will get credit for lead. If the site is selling something, a phone number might be more usefull as people like to talk to someone before sending money online, but the merchant needs to insure the affiliate will get credit for this, for the main reason that the majority WILL call to speak to someone before making a purchase. Thefore number is necessary, but a tracking system needs to be in place to not rip off affiliates.
So, in other words, you're taking someones personal information, ie; credit card info, and submitting it to a third party on their behalf. Are they aware that you are doing this? Do they understand that you are not the merchant and do not not work for the company?
I'm not sure that's legal.
I'm not sure that's legal.
Good point fjpapaleo.
The way you interpreted it, you might be right. The actual example I was referring to didn't involve a card transaction, so yes - the client cannot fail to know who he is dealing with in the example (and we use the client's brand anyway, with client's permission).
So Phew! I'll check with the lawyers on the next one!
But even so, do you think that this is necessarily an issue if done properly? Call centres themselves are outsourced branches of organisations, but take cards on behalf of merchants. The trick - as you say - is probably to make sure that there is no confusion in the eyes of the buyer.
Alternatively, I think we would be just as likely to take the payment ourselves. In this process we certainly become liable for the delivery of the goods or service at that point, which is a large increase in risk, but we lived with that risk with reselling PPC for some time anyway so not all new territory for us I guess.
Makes me think though.
Update - they confirmed the deal today. I'll run a week's trial and report back. A real test case, what timing!
My dayjob company tracks the affiliate phone orders with the code under the phone number trick (Incidentally, for merchants, having the order taker not ask for this until the actual ordering is underway is a HUGE plus to the whole process. Forcing your Customer Service people to ask right away or in any other, less logical place, tends to alienate the customer.)
There's ups and downs to this, since we do have to pay the CS people, as well as the affiliate, so technically these orders aren't as profitable for us EXCEPT that once on the phone, everybody's going to make some extra money, because the sales are invariably higher. I've done the CS thing, and if I couldn't upsell or cross-sell something, I was sorely disappointed. Somebody simply asking the question, "Were you after anything else today?" is incredibly powerful.
To that end, I tend to seek out merchants who track phone orders, since the size of orders, on the average, tends to be greater.
So, in other words, you're taking someones personal information, ie; credit card info, and submitting it to a third party on their behalf. Are they aware that you are doing this? Do they understand that you are not the merchant and do not not work for the company?I'm not sure that's legal.
On the other hand, on a merchant site I intend to drop 100% because of invasive pop-up ordering windows that verifiably and aggressively sabotage affiliate commissions, they have it in their privacy policy that information might be shared with third parties, including for purposes of taking orders.
I don't believe there would be any legal issues if it's divulged in a privacy policy that information can be shared. Not that everyone will read a privacy policy, but their backs are covered.
