What's up with this?

[fitnfree]

I was advertising a product from Share-a-Sale. It reported over 90 sales...time goes by, nothing shows in commissions. I contact them and am told the following:

These transactions are not actual sales, and will be voided.

Suffice it to say, I'm totally disillusioned and extremely upset at this development, especially after being misled to believe this product was selling and spending good $$$ to advertise it.

So, anyone know if this is some cruel form of trickery or what??

[maxie104]

Dear fitnfree, SS. Don't know what they are playing at but thank you for the heads up. One of my sites is half shareasale. Yikes....... Email them for an answer and let us know. Deb.

[Larwee]

Brian, from ShareASale, told me yesterday that he has subscribed to this ShareASale forum so I am hoping he will be by to comment on this.

[Linda Buquet]

I hope Brian sees this and responds.

Was it the merchant you contacted? Did they explain WHY?

I can offer a couple potential scenarios, but of course they are only guesses.

1st off it's probably the specific merchant, this problem relates to - not
Shareasale in general. So don't avoid SAS due to one merchant.

Some merchants naturally get lots of returns - good example
a shoe merchant. I'd NEVER buy shoes online, need to try them on
but lots of people do and there are lots of returns.

BUT in any event there should never be 100% returns.

One ODD ball thing I've had happen a couple times when I was managing programs - one of the staff was doing testing and placed a bunch of fake orders as they were testing various things to be sure the affiliate tracking was set up right or the cookie worked for the right time-frame. They forgot they'd previously clicked an affiliate link as they were testing and all the fake sales were cookied and credited to an affiliate and had to be reversed.

This could be plausible if it was 4 or 5 sales. But not 90!

Let me know if you can't get this resolved with the merchant and need Brian's email, but you should have a SAS support email you can try 1st.

[Brian - ShareASale]

Hey All... I did subscribe to this forum, but don't remember receiving any note on this thread.... Anyhow, glad Larwee pointed it out to me this morning.

Fitnfree - There really isn't much I can do to resolve the issue unless you send me more information - i.e., I will need to know either your userID or username as well as which merchant sent you the reply about your sales. If you would like to do so you can send them to brian @ shareasale and I'll look into it.

[Brian - ShareASale]

Fitnfree - I did some looking around and found what I think is your account and the merchant in question, etc...

Looks like they had an improper code on their website which was triggering a "Lead" commission everytime you sent them a visitor.

Their program is designed to pay on "Sale" commission actions, which if they occur will show the word "Sale" in the transaction reports, as opposed to "Lead".

In this case, we've taken the merchant offline as they need to fix their site and the code that they have placed on it so that it does not register "Leads".

I'm sorry that you came across this problem, if you would like to discuss in further detail just let me know.

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Brian for looking into it and letting us know what happened.
Thanks too for taking the merchant offline until they fix their tracking issue.

[fitnfree]

Yes, thank you Brian. Sorry I didn't see this earlier. This was a very upsetting issue for me and left me quite disillusioned after 2 months of heavily pushing this product. And as it appears, since I'm sitting with only $1.80 in my account, I didn't make one red cent off of it. But it doesn't say "leads", those numbers show up under sales.

Well, I had to cut my losses and run, but it left me with quite a bitter taste in my mouth and a bit fearful of trying any more SAS merchants, although many do sound compatible with my site.

[Linda Buquet]

fitnfree I can feel your pain on this one and can't imagine how frustrating it must be. However it sounds like this was a problem on the merchant end, which can happen with any network and is the merchant's fault. If they dont do the code right, it won't track right.

But good thing it was caught and they were pulled offline so it would not happen to another affiliate and so the merchant can't get the benefit of any new affiliate traffic until they fix the problem.