[drivetowin]

To me though there are two very different issues.

The issue of lowering commission percentages, for me at least, did not make me remove Next from my sites - yes, sure it meant I gave them lower priority than other merchants but I still kept them on the site. Having discussed the reasons for the reduction in commission with AW at the time, I can actually understand the commercial logic behind the decision, and hand on heart, if I had been Next at the time, with a purely commercial hat on (there is little room for altruism in big business), I would have done exactly the same thing - if you can make 90 widgets a day and you can sell all 90 at 3% commission why would you ever pay 4% commission to do the same thing? - it just doesn't make commercial sense to do so. Before anyone says 'think of the long term' - yes I agree with you but equally would you pay Google 50p a click if you could get away with paying them 30p a click and they still delivered enough clicks to sell all your widgets - I would suggest the answer is no.

The more serious issue for me was that they refused Frostie purely on the basis that he had made previous negative comments about the programme - that to me is totally unacceptable - I will not be held to ransom or feel that I have to look over my shoulder every time before I post a comment about merchant x or merchant y - as long as criticism is constructive then we should all be willing and adult enough to accept whatever criticism is thrown at us - whether we take any notice of the criticism is of course the perogrative of each individual / organisation.