Lots of Duplicates on AW?

[darrenw]

Is anyone else experiencing what look like duplicate transactions on AW?

For every transaction that I get, I get another identical in price either in the same minute, or a minute later, and on a few occasions I've had two, three or even four duplicates in the same two minute period.

Either this, or five different people bought exactly the same pizza in the same minute last night! This is probably unlikely!

This is going to result in a lot of rejections (understandably), and confusion with the merchants.

[guyguy]

Yep i had 6 sales( last week) with commissions of £3.20 in 6 minutes all were rejected.

[Spreader]

Hello chaps,

As merchants, we have this from the other side of the coin, and as you say it can be a bit confusing.

I think (from a distant conversation with Marc Gear) it happens because the user has clicked the "confirm order" button a number of times.

I could be mistaken of course (I'm sure Marc will tell me if I am ).

Cheers,


Zak.

[matbennett]

Seeing this on the merchant system today as well.

Our system doesn't produce duplicates from a double-click, so we don't usually get duplicates at all. Quite a few over the weekend though, so I guess that there was/is another issue.

[darrenw]

This has only started happening (for me) in the last seven days. And I know for a fact that at least one of them was not caused by the user clicking "submit" many times, because I was that user! I notice that some of the merchants have started approving one of the transactions, and rejecting the duplicates - this seems reasonable to me.

[Spreader]

Hi Darren,

Back to the drawing board then with regards to my theory!

Yes. That is true. All of the duplicate orders are displayed in a different colour, so it is easier to delete the duplicate orders and more importantly validate the legitimate ones.

[Marc Gear]

Hi all,

We have identified the problem and hopefully this is resolved. Duplicate detection should now be working.

Zak,

Duplicate commissions can occur for a number of reasons, all of which amount to the visitor sending two requests to our system for the confirmation of sale image on your thank-you page. The most common reasons for this are:

The visitor refreshed the confirmation page
The visitor printed the page (probably in netscape)
There was some firewall/proxy/cache inbetween the visitor and awin that requested its own copy of the image.

we catch most duplicates (there is a 5 minute window for which commissions with the same merchant, affiliate, sale amount, clickthrough time (ie probably same cookie) and merchants order ref) are considered duplicate commissions.

The rest appear on your merchant area as 'potential duplicates' so you can cast your eye on them

Please let me know if you get many more of these

[retrolink]

The visitor refreshed the confirmation page
The visitor printed the page (probably in netscape)
There was some firewall/proxy/cache inbetween the visitor and awin that requested its own copy of the image.
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All duplicates, such as those caused by the conditions above, are fixable by the merchants - I have dealt with these kind of issues in the past. Whether or not the merchants would take the time to fix them is another question.