Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you

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.

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).

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 redirectCustomer sees a nice shiny laptop & decide to buyThey get to the checkout & see the merchant has a “coupon code field”Their eyebrows raise ever so slightly & they type “merchant coupon codes” into GoogleUp pops one of the Voucher Code sites with a nice shiny button similar to that aboveBut….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).

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.

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

n What do you think the role of an Affiliate is? 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 NetworksDisable the overwriting of Affiliate CookiesCredit 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?