[RobertR]

I've been offering affiliate program at ShareASale or ClixGalore for my physical products but found out that:

There's a plenty of scam, affiliates buy products with stolen cards and collect affiliate commissions.

This has happened to the point that a victim called police and accussed our company of fraudent charges on her credit card. So I had to explain to the police detective what affiliate marketing is how it works and that my company is not the scamer but the victim.

ClixGalore and ShareASale don't give a sh**t about how damaging this is to my company and almost do nothing to prevent it.

Do you guys have any ideas on how to prevent this?

Babysit and verify every transaction?

[clyde]

What's the percentage of "a lot" if it's 2% or less, that's not bad at all. Just refund and blacklist the card/IP or whatever.

[RobertR]

I would say it was somewhere around 7%.

The problem is that the bank hits you with a chargeback of $20 and scammers usually get 30% of the sale. So you get hit hard and on the top the victim reports you as a scamer all over the internet, BBB and police.

When contacting ClixGalore and ShareASale about it, it's amazing that nobody really cares about the fact that crime was committed and they don't really treat it seriously and do very little to prevent it. It looks like they accept anyone who can fill in an online form as an affiliate.

I guess you really have to babysit the transactions and check them all every single day which I did not do.

Edited by RobertR, 03 February 2012 - 20:33.

[DogDo]

Do you get the opportunity to screen affiliates that sell your product or are you on auto approve affiliates?

If you are on auto approve this would probably go down a lot if you screen them (although that probably has its own problems) Next to doing that maybe you can screen them before hand, and if allowed contact them before approval. If that's not possible then maybe making it clear to affiliates that if they apply to your program in your terms area that they must tell you what relevant sites they own that would make them a good fit for your program, or how they intend to promote you... Just some thoughts, i really dont know about shareasale or clixgore policies but if you contacted them and they really don't care, probably nothing you can do.. Maybe increase the price of your product to make up for % your losing from the scumbags that are cheating you. 7% seems pretty high for physical products but i cant think of anything except either paying less commission or charging more money to solve it.

Edited by DogDo, 03 February 2012 - 23:26.