Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you

10. Dec 2008 | 9 Comments

Apparently now in the UK 1 out of every 200 visits to an online retail site comes from a Voucher/Coupon Code website. As this type of traffic is increasing year on year, your hard earned affiliate commissions could be getting flushed down the drain when your cookie is overwritten by these rogue practices.

How it Works

Many of the big voucher websites have one incredibly sneaky way of overwriting your hard earned cookie (There are legit ones out there that do things by the book, but I’m not naming names here).

Show Discount & Save

So in order to even view the discount codes you first need to click on the button to reveal them, this opens up a popunder which sets a new cookie, overwriting yours. Now this is where it starts to get very very sneaky.

When you have a large database driven site it’s very easy to start creating pages around every merchant / site known to man that has an affiliate program (regardless of whether they have voucher codes or not), some sites have to do this manually others can do it on the fly. They then start optimising the pages for “Merchant Name Vouchers, Discount Codes & Coupons.”

So here’s now a typical scenario:

You send a customer to the merchant via your affiliate redirect
Customer sees a nice shiny laptop & decide to buy
They get to the checkout & see the merchant has a “coupon code field”
Their eyebrows raise ever so slightly & they type “merchant coupon codes” into Google
Up pops one of the Voucher Code sites with a nice shiny button similar to that above
But….low & behold there’s no coupon codes.
The voucher website has STILL overwritten your cookie though.

This is what pisses me off the most, people are ready to buy, ready to commit. Yet you have you sale stolen from you at the last minute (seemingly without any effort).

Networks are turning a blind eye

One of the UK’s large voucher websites last year reported they sent over $250,000,000 worth of sales through to merchants. With this type of volume the networks are turning a blind eye & letting these sites get away with stealing YOUR commissions.

What is the Role of an Affiliate?

It seems this varies considerably, but here’s a few thoughts (I’d like to know yours also):

What do you think the role of an Affiliate is?

What can be done to combat this problem?

There’s four solutions to this that I can think of:

I look very carefully before promoting some merchants now, if they have a coupon discount field it’s a big RED FLAG for me.
Ban the offending affiliates from Networks
Disable the overwriting of Affiliate Cookies
Credit the Affiliate that sends the consumer to the purchase page before the affiliate that provides the coupon.

What solutions do you see to combat this rising problem?

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9 Comments on "Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you"

PPCblogger 10. Dec 2008, 11:03 am

The UK IAB have joined with a load of networks to stop this quite recently.

http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/iabsaffiliatemarketingcouncillaunchescodeofbestpractice110808.mxs

Seen e-mails from 3 of the biggest Aff networks in the UK warning about this over the last week or so.

I like the concept by the IAB but realistically it’s going to be very hard to police.

By having the pages set up around specific vouchers codes these sites dont have, still ultimately makes for a bad user experience for the customer. Plus it’s easy to get a cookie on a machine without a click required, so some sites tactics may evolve to more blackhat techniques.

Yoki 10. Dec 2008, 4:36 pm

This has come to a head in the US already – one of the companies that I have had dealings with in the past (CSN Stores) has come up with a decent solution to this – this blog post describes it well: http://www.jangro.com/a/2008/01/15/not-the-same-old-status-quo-at-csn-stores/.

In a nutshell – the coupon affiliate gets full credit if they’re the only referrer. If another affiliate is the first referrer they get only a very small percentage of the affiliate revenue. It’s a pretty good solution if you’re a merchant wanting to support your legitimate affiliates.

Anon 10. Dec 2008, 10:50 pm

> What solutions do you see to combat this rising problem?

Simple: provide a coupon yourself. (Next to your affiliate-link.)
This way the customer won’t look for it on other sites.
Sure – this requires considerably more work from your part than just dropping that link, but it also adds value to your site.

quadszilla 11. Dec 2008, 2:08 am

Cool post. On some offers, you can include a string in the URL that pre-populates the form field with your coupon code.

In general, though, I hate coupon codes and encourage affiliate program managers not to use them.

On the black hat side of the equation, it certainly makes sense to try to rank for “[affiliate program product name] coupon code” to snipe these sales.

RabbitRoger 12. Dec 2008, 11:15 am

Another solution is to share commision between affiliates, as i know, some advertisers are already doing this.

Kyle 12. Dec 2008, 10:41 pm

Sucks that they are doing this and since the method is rogue it simply shouldn’t be allowed. That being said, the whole premise of a coupon code site is to steal the sale so Im not really surprised. I’d say a large majority of affiliate programs not only take last cookie over first cookie but also take coupon code over cookies too.

David Koh 01. Apr 2009, 3:21 am

Wow, it’s sneaky indeed. Not all orders have a “coupon” field there, so one way would be to only promote items that do not have a “coupon” field during the buying process. Anyway, what the coupon sites are doing aren’t illegal, it’s just not very nice. And in the cases where there is no coupon present but where a pretense there is exists, then I would say it is very unkind of them.

I agree with Yoki, if most affiliate networks did as his comment suggested, I’m sure a lof of people will be much happier.

PIGGY 20. Jun 2009, 1:29 am

it’s called business … as an online affiliate marketer myself, there is competition.. maybe the webmaster should have had a coupon code ready for their guest lol why would she leave and think, omg i could save money… who9 would want to spend more seriously?