Firstly I want to say I really do believe this is the best forum, I hesitated between this and affiliate program management but wasn't sure it would fit there, I truly do beleive this is the best forum and in any case I can't seem to access the sub forum, so please do not give me a penalty, I haven't used these forums that often and it isn't always obvious which is the best, especially when one of the 2 I'm hesitating between doesn't seem to work. I run an affiliate program where I give 50% commission and my best affiliate is actually someone I know in real life but I feel defrauded by him due to how he did the website. Firstly, his domain name is exactly mine but with hyphens added (imagime my domain is mysite.com, his is my-site.com), already I was mad that he did that, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. His entire site is designed as if he is the original seller of my products, there is no other contents on his site, anyone going on his site will think he is the original vendor, so much so that many of my customers were emailing him for customer support I had to force him to remove all his contact information and he put a link to the contact form on my site, further giving the impression he is the original vendor of the products. His entire website is filled with "our product does this" and "our product does that". He also has a "buy" button on his site that links directly to my order form, and he keeps wondering why his number of sales are lower than the number of clicks on his buy button. Yesterday I told him if his site isn't redone from scratch in compliance to my new TOS (which I updated to say your website cannot be made to look as if you're the original seller of the products) by midnight that I would suspend his account and forfeit the few hundred dollars he currently has due. He said he'd have it done, but eventually decided to remove his site and make it redirect directly to my website. Is it just me or is this not at all how you should use an affilaite program and is extremely misleading? Also, since I often update my site and he never did, his site is providing completely false information about my products and is actually driving away sales from my new products. Thanks
Very serious offense. Have you ask him again after update of your terms and conditions? I am sure, he will be agree do so.
I just want to confirm, regardless of my TOS and what I want, is it normal that I really don't like the way he setup his website to use my affiliate program? Would other commission based affiliate programs allow this?
Just ban him - he's more than earned it ! From the tone of your post I would guess that your not exactly a 'hard nose', but sometimes you just have to take positive action to protect your hard earned interests. It's always difficult though when it involves a personal friend, but really he is defeating the purpose of your affiliate system, plus he's not doing your search engine results any good.
For now he is suspended since a few days and it's likely to stay that way. I wanted to give him a chance to redesign his site, but when I asked what sort of changes he'd make my jaw dropped. He said he'd remove all the information about the product and just put images and large font with super marketing (don't forget his website has zero content other than information to sell my product). That's just making it even worst. No one has directly answered my question yet, is it normal that I do not want my affiliates to make websites that try to appear as though they are the original seller of the product? Do other affiliate programs allow their affiliates to do that or is it standard procedure to not allow affiliates to do that?
No proper affiliate system I've ever seen would knowingly tolerate such a thing - like I said it totally defeats the point of the affiliate marketing strategy, and hurts the brand and the search results. The only exception I can think of is some programs which work with drop shippers - they don't give a f**k what you do so long as you sell product lol.