Ripped off? Or just a crap merchant? Advice please.

I could really use some advice from some of the affiliate veterans out there.

I have a mini site with a merchant that I set up about two months ago. I made a sale (or so I thought) for about £5,000 resulting in quite a nice commission, as you can imagine. The cheque was due at the beginning of this month and it didn't arrive, so I emailed the merchant yesterday and asked when I could expect payment.

He replied quite fast, saying that it was not a sale, it was him testing the software and that I could see this from the management area of the affiliate program, and if I had further questions, I should ask.

So I sent back the reply:

I see no management area of the software. I can see nowhere that it tells me that they are test sales. If they were test sales, why did you not point that out when I wrote to you asking for feedback on the sales?+ Or point it out when you made the test sales??

+ I had sent an email following the "sales" asking for feedback on what item(s) were sold so that I could possibly optimise for them. I got no reply.

Just so that you get an idea on what sort of a company this is, I got an enquiry, by phone for around £40,000 worth of materials, which I passed over to the merchant, asking them that if it went through that I would still get the commission due. They didn't even let me know if it went through or not. I sent a terse email saying I thought it out of order that they didn't even have the decency to keep me in the loop of such a massive enquiry. So you can see that our relationship was deteriorating, as, as you all know, there absolutely must be a decent level of trust between merchant and affiliate or things do break down.

I should point out that this was not through any affiliate network site; it was all set up independently using allaffiliatepro.com's software. So I don't have the support of a decent mediator.

My question is, what would you do in this situation? It goes without saying that I will remove the links to this company (annoying as I don't have another company to swap them to, and I have two mini sites set up to sell their products, so it has a certain investment of time factored into this as well).

I outrank them for several of their own products and could probably do them some real damage if I were feeling vindictive enough, though, that really isn't my style.

I would like some feedback on what you think of this situation please.

Thanks for reading,

Jez.

 

Sounds dodgy to me. If they were performing a "test" sale, surely if it were genuine they would have informed you about it. I would move onto another merchant...

 

Take their greedy asses out.

 

Keep ranking high.
Contact their competition if they have not already contacted you.
Hopefully their competition is wiser and will show up and pay you decent commission.
Welldone and good luck with the site.

 

OK, thanks everyone for the feedback. I will post the outcome as I am still waiting to hear from the merchant his excuses. Then I pull the plug on him.

Jez.