Is This A Normal practice from Merchants?

[flixster]

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Just trying to get my head round this and if it is a normal/accepted thing to do or a bit on the sneaky side.

- A customer clicks through my affilliate link

- The customer chooses a product, goes through the purchase process (including completing personal details)

- The customer then does not complete the transaction for one reason or another

- A short time later the merchant sends an email to the customer offering free postage if they complete the transaction within the next 2 days.

- The merchant includes their affiliate link within the email overriding my cookie.

This is the first time I have come across this, just wondering if anyone else has?

[tombo]

Just trying to get my head round this and if it is a normal/accepted thing to do.

- A customer clicks through my affilliate link

- The customer chooses a product, goes though the purchase process (including completing personal details)

- The customer then does not complete the transaction for one reason or another

- A short time later the merchant sends an email to the customer offering free postage if they complete the transaction within the next 2 days.

- The merchant includes their affiliate link within the email overriding my cookie.

This is the first time I have come across this, just wondering if anyone else has? Doesn't seem like a good practice to me though.

[Hero]

it's not the merchant's affiliate link in the email, it's from a remarketing company providing this service to the merchant that works on a CPA basis like any other affiliate. It might even be that, if the programme is running on 2 affiliate networks, that you're promoting them through network A and the remarketing company through network B, in which case they'll dedupe locally on last click as well.

[adamski]

What Hero is saying is not true for merchants on Affiliate Window. Any email remarketing done on this network uses what we call a 'soft click' and cannot overwrite prior affiliate cookies.

The scenario outlined by Tombo is unusual and not something we would condone. If you drop me a note with some more details I'll look into it immediately.

Thanks
Adam