Merchants & International Tracking

[Lee_Owen]

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With the internet address of all domains being www.merchantaz.com, is it fair to presume that merchants should understand the www defines world wide web. Meaning the whole world can view.

When an affiliate optimises for traffic, their website not only gets displayed in front of UK visitors but those overseas also. Would it be fair to assume that when a merchant sets up, they should accept trade from all over the world, when this is in place, that their affiliate program should reflect this?

In recent weeks (others previously) there's merchants that accept world wide traffic but only pay out to UK traffic, but have another program with another network for another country's tracking - the result being, free traffic on both networks.

And with another merchant, they only wish to boost UK traffic, but the sign up page involves another 30 countries, any non UK traffic you send doesn't get rewarded. So in both instances, free traffic is sent.

So to the poll question, should merchants cater for international traffic or when setting up a program, ensure that when a user visits through an affiliate link, only UK visitors can sign up?

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My previous post turned into a poll:

I'm getting fed up with free traffic merchants, we've had the merchants playing at being affiliates conversation, the exit windows that don't track, the one product merchants with a couple of others not on offer to be tracked on site, but now on to merchants that only pay for UK traffic but are international websites.

Should merchants who allow for a-z of country sign ups but only pay for the UK, be asked to politely only have the UK as a country on their sign up pages when traffic is sent to their site? I for one think they would miss the traffic and extra custom, but then don't we as affiliates when they don't pay up?

I'd run out of fingers listings the merchants that benefit from world wide free traffic on the back of only paying out for UK custom. Who's the mug, us for sending them free traffic or the network not demanding they pay out for what they offer or restrict their landing pages to the UK only, so that anybody non British leaves immediately. (I'd also leave an option of mug for me, for not geo targetting and refusing to allow merchants to get the free traffic.)

Maybe then, they will be pay for all traffic.

[Lee_Owen]

As an addition, would networks benefit by offering natural geo targeting within a pool format for banners? so that if a merchant only offers UK traffic but caters for the world. The network enables the affiliate to choose to display the banner to UK only and display a different internatioanl merchant instead.

I presume there may well be software to do this already, if so, which do you use to give best results and target your through traffic better?

Also in keeping with the network offerings, would it also be good if they stated absolutely on the merchant page the following indication, so that affiliates didn't have to go through the process of signing up, trying out the site or checking all possibilites - but this should be an automatic personal process to safeguard you anyway.

Traffic: Worldwide/UK Only etc. etc.

PS: None of this latest subject matter is related to Jamster, they're sorting themselves out quite well, this is really regarding new merchants and previous others.

[km8]

I'm not voting in that poll because the questions are not designed to get an unbiased answer. But I do agree that international merchants should track and reward all traffic. At worst, it's a minor internal accounting exercise for say, the German branch to reimburse commissions to the UK branch and vice versa. I do think it's cynical/lazy/sly for international CPA merchants to say we will only pay for UK traffic.

And yes, I accept they may pay different rates in different markets but that too seems a minor problem which could be covered in the program terms.

[Lee_Owen]

km8, I was just wondering if anyone shared my feeling about it being a problem, which is why the poll options, as merchants appear quite blase about it. And networks appear not to realise they're losing out on vital revenue when if they combatted the problem or had a geo targetting option / encouraged geo targetting, their overrides would increase as would affiliate earnings.

[km8]

I quite agree Lee but do you think anybody, but anybody, is going to vote:

No, I'm not bothered about losing revenue and sending free traffic

OK, I know somebody will now, just out of contrariness (I would if I hadn't already stated my view )

That's not a poll any more than this si a poll: 'Who would you like to sleep with:'
Dot Cotton
or
Natalie Imbruglia (whoever she is)

Sorry, stole some inspiration from a thread I read yesterday!

[Lee_Owen]

Fair enough, but it'll get some thinking either way. What options would you have had? because I thought about it and until finding out people do care, there wasn't much to offer.

[km8]

Fair enough, but it'll get some thinking either way. What options would you have had? because I thought about it and until finding out people do care, there wasn't much to offer.

Personally, I'd have deduced that people do care and not bother posting a poll which would only get one answer. But, yes, thinking is good.

Why aren't you sitting out on the deck at this hour on a Friday evening anyhow?

[Barry]

Yes, in short.

I get well annoyed when merchants have a different program for different countries.

I have experience of a couple of companies that I work with here in the UK, and I can see from my web stats that I have international traffic coming to their product pages on my site, but I had to go through the rigmorall of appling for their 'different' country programs to include on my page. Even then they mail all the time with qustions on 'how' I promote to their country on a uk domain.

The simple answer is - I don't promote crap - I just put sites up and search engines come and spider them - sometimes my pages get into google.it or google.ie - thats not my plan - but it happens.
And how I promote them is to put a big flag of their country over their banner - its not rocket science to filter vistiotrs to the right nationality site is it?

I think tracking should be worldwide - though the implementation of this with different currencies maybe a big hurdle.

[Lee_Owen]

Why aren't you sitting out on the deck at this hour on a Friday evening anyhow?

Because I've been royally rogered by google in the last month.

[John Jupp]

I think tracking should be worldwide - though the implementation of this with different currencies maybe a big hurdle.

It's not difficult at all if merchants tried. I know some merchants deliberately not paying out on overseas sales and one of the worst offenders is on TD.

Most merchants I list have worldwide delivery and do offer multiple currency commissions. What's more I have one which does so in 64 currencies covering over 190 countries!!! They have no problem tracking this. It's just a tiny string to add to the affiliate variable which identifies country and currency.

The problem is where companies deliberately set up multiple sites which do not permit cross migration instead of using the currency and nationality string. If they did this they could maintain multiple language options and differing databases for products on one site without any problem. Then if a customer wished to switch sites an additional string would create an affiliate sub-id (Child ID) of the affiliates for these other sites depending how many there are. I use a parent id for a .com and a child id for the .co.uk and the parent is the one offering multiple choice. All that is needed if the merchant establishes additional sites is for me to have child id's for those sites.

As billing is made to the parent id everything is migrated to the one account for payment. It's simple to do yet some merchants which should know better considering their established position rarely bother.

[KGP]

i would suggest we start mentioning the merchants that DO accept european, US and non-european/nonUS traffic from their accounts on the british networks

i know that dealtime accepts european traffic and so does play.com pixmania.com and germanwings.com how about you do you know others?

if you think that it should be a differente thread regarding this issue please proceed.

[km8]

i would suggest we start mentioning the merchants that DO accept european, US and non-european/nonUS traffic from their accounts on the british networks

I agree - that would be useful information - especially as, now that I think about it, I can't see how it could be difficult to implement cross-border tracking. I know one merchant who trades pan-european but pays only on in-country traffic for each country. When I asked, I got what I now realise was flannel about different markets having different budgets.

I won't name the merchant because I think the idea was to name those that do have cross-border tracking. But it is a nonsense - makes 10 times the work for affiliates.

[everydayholiday]

it was mentioned a long time ago opodo and virgin atlantic accept international sales. is that still the case ?

[EyeOfTheTiger]

Because I've been royally rogered by google in the last month.

A familiar sounding story if ever there was one

Tiger

[sarah80]

it was mentioned a long time ago opodo and virgin atlantic accept international sales. is that still the case ?

Hi there,

Opodo does accept international sales for our core products such as hotel, car hire and flights. However, our prices are displayed in GBP (£ sterling) only.
With flight bookings we are not set up for international delivery of paper tickets. These restrictions are in place as we are Pan-European company, but if US/international customers are interested in booking flights with Opodo they can do so by purchasing an e-ticket and ensure they use any UK address when requested in the booking process.

Hope this helps,

Sarah