Countrybookshop - experiences.

[Rich]

Just wondering how others get on with Countrybookshop. I seem to get a lot of rejected commissions from them and I'm not sure why. I made my first ever support ticket about it saying: -

Could you tell me if there is any particular reason for the high number of rejections from Countrybookshop? They are promoted on a price comparison site and I can't see why they should have a much higher rate of sales that don't complete when compared with the other sellers.

but I've just got a standard reply back: -

A commission may be rejected for a number of reasons. The most common reasons for rejecting commissions are: * The Transaction was fraudlent * The commission was duplicated. Commissions can appear duplicated if the customer refreshes or prints the confirmation page. * The order was cancelled by the customer If you believe a commission was rejected when it should have been approved, please contact the merchant involved directly.

If it was fraud I would expect other stores to be affected. Some could be duplicates, but not all as I put the ISBN number in the clickref to track what sells and most are unique numbers. The orders could be cancelled, but again it seems odd that so many are at one store.

Sorry to have a moan here. I don't make much of an override for Awin, but I thought I would get a better answer than that.

I will get in touch with Countrybookstore, but it would be good to know if its just me or if others have noticed the same before I do.

[HeresJonny]

We get the same thing on BuyAt with CountryBookshop and I'm waiting for Malcolm to come back to me about it. They probably account for the highest rejection rate for all the merchants we promote.

Jon

[pistol101]

I think the problem your facing is that CountryBookShop are able to take orders for a massive amount of books. There is a huge number that are out of print and never going to be published again or that they can't get hold of copies. Customers then cancel the orders when they can't ship it or they find another book shop thats got it.

[Rich]

I just checked 5 of todays rejections: -
1 was no longer stocked
1 was 'This title is ordered upon request, usually dispatched within 3-7 working days'
2 where 'Usually dispatched within 1 to 2 working days'
& 1 was 'In stock, usually dispatched within 24 hours'

Admittedly these have transaction dates between 6th & 27th May so stock details may have changed.

The above details are shown on my site, along with similar details for 11 other stores, so people shouldn't be going for out of stock items unless its a last resort. Strange.

It's kind of good to know others have spotted similar trends on another network. My first thought was that they had the tracking set up on a page before the end of the order process. But even that shouldn't account for 50% being rejected.

[andy_jacko]

from a consumer point of view:

my girlfriend ordered a book that took 3 weeks+ to arrive and we had emailed them several times asking why with no reply, not even that it was being reordered or anything.


may just be a one off

regards andy

[999gi]

Seems like your on the right track

One other thing that Ive noticed is some merchants dont have proper real time credit card verification so end up showing a sale and then rejecting it, where normal merchants would never have recorded the sale. No idea if it applies here though.

[Marc Gear]

Rich,

I've no real explaination for why there is a high rejection rate on Country Bookshop, and I'll look into this - though I would certianly suggest contacting the merchant directly to ask them, as only they will know for certian what the reason the rejected commissions are.

Please be aware that we recieve a lot of enquiries from affiliates asking about why commissions are rejected, or about reversal rates, and so we do have a standard response for such enquiries, in order to better cope with support. By far the most common reasons for low approved commissions are a high level of fraud, or poorly targeted traffic, neither of which should really be an issue for a price comparison site.

[Rich]

Thanks for the reply Marc. I fully understand that you probably get far too many emails about why was X rejected.

May be it is just poor credit card processing or poor customer service that is causing the sales to fail to complete, though I'm surprised I've had no emails from visitors moaning about it - I used to get plenty when I included SplashDVD!

[darrenw]

I usually send an email to the merchant about rejections, especially if it is their "first time" at rejecting a commission. So far, all merchants have sent me back a polite reply explaining what has happened - some of them sometimes go into a lot of detail about what has happened.

I'm happy with this - if I didn't get any sort of reply back - then I would be concerned.

Regards,
Darren.

[renegade]

Originally posted by 999gi Seems like your on the right track One other thing that Ive noticed is some merchants dont have proper real time credit card verification so end up showing a sale and then rejecting it, where normal merchants would never have recorded the sale. No idea if it applies here though.

This definitely accounts for one merchant we suffer higher than normal reversal levels from.
They explained they manually approve all credit card transactions so the cart/network credits us with sales which they later reverse due to fraud or visitors ordering from outer mongolia etc.
For these merchants, even if they don't have real-time validation, to add a simple validation script to their shopping cart to filter out most of the duff sales and subsequent reversals resulting in less work for them and less feel-bad factor for their affiliates.