Normally I log into Affiliate Window and Affiliate Future seperately, but yesterday I had the both windows open at once on the same screen, so I could see both lists.
While checking my commissions to validate yesterday, I noticed the same Order ID appear in both Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window. The thought had struck me "oh well this is a random occurance, customer has probably gone to PPC ad and a Voucher site for example" So I emailed both providers to gain information and click appends or code that would tag this and stop it from happening again.
Job done I thought, random duplicate must be the only one, my web developer will impliment the code so it wont happen again.
In a conversation with Affiliate Future they mentioned "have you located anymore duplicates?" not at that point in time but I did plan to sit down and go through all the hundreds of records to spot any.
After time of searching and checking in the small hours last night I found more
all from the same Affiliate Future affiliate, and random affiliates within Affiliate Window, 10, 20, 60, 80,more and more 100's of duplicates and this is just going back to only September 2007. There was a cold sense of panic when I realised I had paid out 10% commission on 1 sale, and 7% commission on the same sale again, sure I can cancel the current ones that are duplicate and solve it, but going back over hundreds if not thousands of records there could be a loss of £££££'s to my company.
What I have done today is discuss with both Affiliate Future and Affiliate
Window the last cookie time, as an industry standard I have been told it is the
last cookie to drop that attributes the sale.
The difficulty comes when confirming this information between 2 Affiliate
Companies Affiliate Future need the click time from Affiliate Window to confirm who is
the real holder of the sale , and Affiliate Window will not release this information to them because of copyright.
If I take down both sets of information and verify it myself then how do I give the evidence to either provider to prove all my duplicates? I did think about sending it to some form of Affiliate Consultant to verify as a third part that way there could be no arguement over who the last cookie and thus sale belongs to.
At this moment in time I have only checked back to Sept 07 and there are nearly 100 duplicates, all from 1 affiliate in Affiliate Future and random Affiliates in Affiliate Window. If I do gather all the information I need is there any way of claiming this back or attributing who the sale belongs to. I understand the point about click append code (which I had never come across before)
The point is if I have 500 or so duplicates over 2-3 years then I will have paid out nearly double what I should have. I'm sure if any retail customer has been charged twice by a shop they be able to claim back the money on their credit card by law.
Has this happened to any other merchant

, I know there are hundreds of records we all have to check, but bit stunned to be honest :eek:
will teach me to check records more carefully.