this has nothing to do with whether or not rebill offers align with your ethics... if your brain had the capacity to think intelligently, you would understand the issue here is the ongoing problem of bad business practice by advertisers and affiliate networks
Suck a Dick Vivera/Opes/Mike/Mitch/DEE
- Thread starter mysticls
- Start date
So, when these companies are "charging you back" - are they deducting money from what had yet to be paid-out, or are they sending you a bill for the chargebacks?
glad i pushed rebills, banked hard like a mofo, then got the hell out of it for the most part a while ago..
drop ship, lead gen, and my own products FTW now
drop ship, lead gen, and my own products FTW now
got a few sales charged back.
Copes charged me back a few, nothing major
eAds told me of the issue and covered every sale.
Copes charged me back a few, nothing major
eAds told me of the issue and covered every sale.
lol i think its funny its being referred to as chargebacks... when really that is something totally different that affects the advertiser unless they are actual chargebacks from 1000 fraud sales which i highly doubt.
make relationships direct...networks arent protecting their affiliates anymore
make relationships direct...networks arent protecting their affiliates anymore
Posted this in the Copeac thread as well since they're related:
Not taking sides here. But everyone knows the rebill world is in a very precarious state. Everything that is free trial related is such a careful balance. The days of doing whatever you want on the merchant side are done and things are being reigned in. No auto cross sells, upsells, high charge amounts monthly, etc. So it's made it quite the difficult situation for advertisers to make it back out. Where before they were profitable on month one to run more compliant with none of that stuff with the current cpa's it's at like month 2.5 now. Still profitable for them just nothing like it was. So I think that's why you're seeing these things happen. I wouldn't be surprised soon if you saw lengthening terms for rebill traffic as well. A lot of advertisers are making network carry the terms longer because they're not making up the money as fast and a lot don't have the money to float it.
From my understanding the margins have got very small on the advertisers side and they're still carrying a great deal of risk to keep the offers alive. I'm not saying they're going broke but as with anything in life there's a pain/pleasure motivating principle. And honestly I'm sure they were at the point where they were thinking well what do we do. We have a few choices:
A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.
I'm curious what everyone thinks is the best. Their are still a lot of guys that are making good coin on these deals so even with the drama I'm guessing most of you don't want A. B could be done but then you have no knowledge of what's going on. Where with C you have transparency however can wind up in the hole at the end of the month.
Which do you chose?
I personally chose B. for myself as I know what my metrics are constantly and if it stops working I shut it down. I don't like C at all because it's an issue of I may run all month and then have a bunch of chargebacks from the advertiser and find out I lost money on a big campaign. Really I post this question more generaly to all verticals rather then just this specific situation. It's quite common in leads to have 5-10% of them refunded for non-working phone numbers. If I we come to an affiliate with that that's running a campaign and managing profitability they're going to get pissed so the question is what is the right way to handle these situations?
Back to the rebill thing. I'm not sure how many of you know this but the merchant accounts are kept alive by the volume going through. If the volume drops and the chargeback % from visa/mc start coming in from the last few months the ratio's get all out of whack and the merchant account goes down. At that point no one gets paid as there's no money to pay and no merchant account to rebill with. So along with trying to be fair to everyone they have to keep the volume up to keep cb ratio's inline or they can't bill and everyone gets fucked all along the whole line. So when you say why don't they just do..... make sure you're thinking of more then just yourself. It's not a battle of us against them. Don't just assume they're trying to screw you, they're just trying to keep their businesses alive the same as you.
P.S. I don't have any of these offers up through these advertisers currently ( advanced, optimum, int'l acai.... ) but have worked with them in the past. They do what they can to pay their bills and keep offers up so you can all keep making money.
Not taking sides here. But everyone knows the rebill world is in a very precarious state. Everything that is free trial related is such a careful balance. The days of doing whatever you want on the merchant side are done and things are being reigned in. No auto cross sells, upsells, high charge amounts monthly, etc. So it's made it quite the difficult situation for advertisers to make it back out. Where before they were profitable on month one to run more compliant with none of that stuff with the current cpa's it's at like month 2.5 now. Still profitable for them just nothing like it was. So I think that's why you're seeing these things happen. I wouldn't be surprised soon if you saw lengthening terms for rebill traffic as well. A lot of advertisers are making network carry the terms longer because they're not making up the money as fast and a lot don't have the money to float it.
From my understanding the margins have got very small on the advertisers side and they're still carrying a great deal of risk to keep the offers alive. I'm not saying they're going broke but as with anything in life there's a pain/pleasure motivating principle. And honestly I'm sure they were at the point where they were thinking well what do we do. We have a few choices:
A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.
I'm curious what everyone thinks is the best. Their are still a lot of guys that are making good coin on these deals so even with the drama I'm guessing most of you don't want A. B could be done but then you have no knowledge of what's going on. Where with C you have transparency however can wind up in the hole at the end of the month.
Which do you chose?
I personally chose B. for myself as I know what my metrics are constantly and if it stops working I shut it down. I don't like C at all because it's an issue of I may run all month and then have a bunch of chargebacks from the advertiser and find out I lost money on a big campaign. Really I post this question more generaly to all verticals rather then just this specific situation. It's quite common in leads to have 5-10% of them refunded for non-working phone numbers. If I we come to an affiliate with that that's running a campaign and managing profitability they're going to get pissed so the question is what is the right way to handle these situations?
Back to the rebill thing. I'm not sure how many of you know this but the merchant accounts are kept alive by the volume going through. If the volume drops and the chargeback % from visa/mc start coming in from the last few months the ratio's get all out of whack and the merchant account goes down. At that point no one gets paid as there's no money to pay and no merchant account to rebill with. So along with trying to be fair to everyone they have to keep the volume up to keep cb ratio's inline or they can't bill and everyone gets fucked all along the whole line. So when you say why don't they just do..... make sure you're thinking of more then just yourself. It's not a battle of us against them. Don't just assume they're trying to screw you, they're just trying to keep their businesses alive the same as you.
P.S. I don't have any of these offers up through these advertisers currently ( advanced, optimum, int'l acai.... ) but have worked with them in the past. They do what they can to pay their bills and keep offers up so you can all keep making money.
Yeah, its hard to know who to blame here. I can say though, it can't be sprung on the affiliates out of nowhere, after its been paid out previously with no scrubs.
For example, if I can expect that I'll lose 10% in "scrubs," I'm going to lower my cpm's, cpc's, etc.
Furthermore, there is no transparency to the affiliate as to what is really going on, and maybe the networks too, but how in the world are we supposed to know these scrubs for "duplicate" sales and all that aren't complete garbage? If Dee and his companies are going to and have in the past try to scam and "walk the fine line" as much as possible with the consumer, it would make sense that they'd do the same to the affiliates as well.
When I got that scrub garbage, I pulled traffic from all their offers. I say we dry them up until they clean things up. Bottom line, if their offers aren't consistent or there are weird scrubs out of nowhere, its not worth it to run their offers.
As for rebills and their instability, rebills have been around for a long time, there is a legit way to run them, and a non-legit way to run them. Perhaps if they weren't trying to be as scammy, people would actually WANT to rebill longer like the big legit companies (such as proactiv), and they'd just make their money that way. There is a stable way to do it.
As a whole, not just rebills, from affiliate to network to tracking software company to merchant, its becoming to much of a big black box, where we have no idea whats going on. I've worked some direct deals where it was me to the merchant, where I've owned the site, forms, everything and just passed the data to the merchant and if there is a problem, you can pin point it 90% of the time instead of, "hmm, was it me, the network, directtrack/linktrust, merchant.." and getting no answers back other than,"everythings fine...don't know what to tell you." So, whats my point? Networks and merchants that stop being so quiet and hidden about their practices and get out of the "run it as scammy as possible and run it in the ground until it dies or becomes illegal" mode will live, others will die in the next couple years. Markets tend to become more efficient vs less. Big pubs will just make their own offers or go direct with merchants (hint hint), and smaller pubs wont be able to pull a margin anymore and it will eventually kill these guys off.
For example, if I can expect that I'll lose 10% in "scrubs," I'm going to lower my cpm's, cpc's, etc.
Furthermore, there is no transparency to the affiliate as to what is really going on, and maybe the networks too, but how in the world are we supposed to know these scrubs for "duplicate" sales and all that aren't complete garbage? If Dee and his companies are going to and have in the past try to scam and "walk the fine line" as much as possible with the consumer, it would make sense that they'd do the same to the affiliates as well.
When I got that scrub garbage, I pulled traffic from all their offers. I say we dry them up until they clean things up. Bottom line, if their offers aren't consistent or there are weird scrubs out of nowhere, its not worth it to run their offers.
As for rebills and their instability, rebills have been around for a long time, there is a legit way to run them, and a non-legit way to run them. Perhaps if they weren't trying to be as scammy, people would actually WANT to rebill longer like the big legit companies (such as proactiv), and they'd just make their money that way. There is a stable way to do it.
As a whole, not just rebills, from affiliate to network to tracking software company to merchant, its becoming to much of a big black box, where we have no idea whats going on. I've worked some direct deals where it was me to the merchant, where I've owned the site, forms, everything and just passed the data to the merchant and if there is a problem, you can pin point it 90% of the time instead of, "hmm, was it me, the network, directtrack/linktrust, merchant.." and getting no answers back other than,"everythings fine...don't know what to tell you." So, whats my point? Networks and merchants that stop being so quiet and hidden about their practices and get out of the "run it as scammy as possible and run it in the ground until it dies or becomes illegal" mode will live, others will die in the next couple years. Markets tend to become more efficient vs less. Big pubs will just make their own offers or go direct with merchants (hint hint), and smaller pubs wont be able to pull a margin anymore and it will eventually kill these guys off.
Call me naive, but how hard would it be to force advertisers to prepay for leads? And then cap the offers at their prepaid count... And fully disclose how many leads are left to be had? Sounds crazy but might keep people honest.. And put a stop to the "well we're fucked by the FTC/Oprah/Visa/MC/Poor Planning/Ahh fuck it, let's just shave" attitude
The thing is everyone is used to 5-10 dollar EPC's.
...You can have the best re-bill offer in the world that's run "legit" but you will never be able to offer the same payout and the same conversion rate to affiliates.
There's just too much risk on the advertiser and too much uncertainty on lead quality, etc, when profit margins go even lower to be "legit". Not to mention the fact you simply can't sell a trial with terms in the open or a straight sale as much as you can sell something "free".
The biggest thing I'm seeing is advertisers with solid offers taking them off networks and just running lower volume internally to stay under the radar. Maybe offering a few volume affiliates a deal to promote them.
...Smax is 100% right as usual that advertisers just have too much risk and most don't have enough cash to float if their merchant accounts died.
For an industry supposedly so innovative we're surprisingly slow to re-model the re-bill model. Or to move into a hybrid re-bill / one-time sale model.
Same thing happened after ringtones went down the tubes.
I don't think thats crazy at all, when I put a clients product through an affiliate program here in Australia, that's exactly what we did. Pre paid and had a cap on leads, anything they went over didn't get paid. Went exclusive to 2-3 affiliates and it was all sweet.
*shrugs*
I choose
So that the liability can be split 3 ways (adv, network, aff) in a fair and just way instead of having 100% of the liability passed to the affiliate who is left blind trying to put the puzzle together ... which is exactly what leads to hate threads like this.
I've got no experience with copeac doing this, but I do with aff.com. Nothing chaps my ass more than having an entity in place so that I can sleep well at night knowing that I'll be paid, then not getting fucking paid.