Merchants Acceptance Of Risk

[beer234]

I am going through a situation with LinkShare where a merchant decided the leads I was generating were "invalid" so LinkShare instantly deactivated my account. Unfortunately this was on the day all my newspaper advertising hit so I got to watch visitors hit a worthless page. Upon working with the merchant they got LinkShare to turn my account back on. Now I wasn't inputing fake leads and I can't control who clicks through the merchants banner so in my opinion, I shoulder the risk of my advertising dollars converting and ther merchant shoulders the risk that the leads are good. In this case the merchant even states they don't pay out invalid leads so I don't understand why they just didn't discard leads that were deemed invalid. I wanted to get the take of other AM marketers. In this case I've spend over $1k on advertising this month and was expecting $2400 in comission. Now I don't even know what i'll get paid.

[edited by: Drastic at 4:12 pm (utc) on July 28, 2005]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[Michael Anthony]

Yep. That's why I hand pick my merchants and have them pay upfront until I trust them. Welcome to your online education!

My colleagues and I never deal with a merchant in real volume without one of us having seen 3 months of consistent ROI, regular timely payments and open honest communications.

Once these things are in place, we may mention the merchant to each other. If you've spent fortunes and now face not being paid, do yourself a favour, send a few discrete stickymails to someone who knows the market and can help you BEFORE you chose your next merchant. It might just save you some money!