[ToughTurkey]

Here is an exchange between IceJerseys.com and myself:

I wrote:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
I was surprised this evening to see that IceJerseys has partnered with ebates.com to provide a further 5% off your products.

Along with the entire community of affiliate marketers, I am concerned about companies such as ebates since they routinely steal commissions that rightfully are not due them. I feel the website upon which the initial action to buy occurs is the site the commission should be paid to. Popups offering extra savings and discounts that appear AFTER a decision is made by the websurfer to purchase are unethical, as they hijack hard earned traffic.

For example, if a surfer is at my site and I convince him to buy one of IceJerseys products, as soon has he clicks my affiliate link he is met with a note from ebates telling him of an extra 5% savings available. Obviously he clicks on that link and I lose my commission. Ebates did nothing to earn that sale, they did not pre-sell the item like I did, did not create a site that promotes your product like I did, however they get the commission.


My question is what does Ebates bring to IceJerseys that it doesn't have without them? They do nothing to drive traffic to your site, merely drain commissions off hard working affiliates.
If you have time, I''''d enjoy hearing your comments.


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Here is the reply:

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Thank you for your e-mail, and I understand your concern. I just wanted to let you know that we do not have any special ''partnerships'' with ebates, other than our standard affiliate arrangement. They are providing their customers with the 5% discount - not us. They earn the same commission as you do.

As far as them stealing customers, I don''t quite see it. If I look back at October, they had 3 sales with our program, while you had 13. In addition, I performed a test purchase by signing up for ebates, and then going to your site, clicking the link and making a $1.00 purchase at icejerseys.com. You will notice it as a reversed transaction. I never received a popup from ebates, and your site received the commission.

Please let me know if you have any other concerns.

Thank you,

Anthony Wolfe
VP Marketing
IceJerseys.com

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

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Anyone have any Comments? Has ebates changed it's ways? Does the popup not always appear? So many questions.

[Kellie aka Ms. B]

ToughTurkey,

Here are a couple of points of clarification which is why the test purchase done by the merchant did not show any diversion of your commission.

First, for ebates to be able to divert traffic, the user has to install the Mo Money application. This is the software app written by Top Moxie. The program is available as a free download on ebates' site once you have registered. Just registering with ebates by itself does not open the can of worms of diverted commissions.

Second, once the Mo Money application is installed on a computer, no clicking is necessary for the diversion to occur! If the merchant had Mo Money on their computer and went to your site clicking on their link, the URL would automatically be redirected through the ebates affiliate link and all tracking would show to ebates. A pop up may briefly appear stating the user is earning x% rebate, but this has not effect on the clickstream. The credit will be going to ebates. From testing that different members have reported here, it seems that how the application shows pops differs. I would suspect that is because of the users browser versions and operating systems. In my testing, the pops sometimes appeared and sometimes didn't. But a browser redirect did occur everytime I clicked on a merchant's link that was partnered with ebates.

Hope that clarified things for you some.

Keep Your Hands Off My Cookies

[ecomcity]

Sneaky bas*ards combined with dumb as a brick merchant AM's make for reducing the networks to Hall monitors at a reform school. The merchant could have told you the truth but evaded it. There top affiliates are parasites like eBates. The greedy ones running that show would drop Icejersies like a hot potatoe for piss poor conversions if they showed no sales on thousands of directed clicks.. Would CJ -BF & LS staff care to devulge how much they payout to ebates.com every month in total commissions??

WebMaster Mike