Comet - Nintendo Wii

stevebrowne · 30-10-07

I have had an email from AW aksing not to promote Wii's ad they are getting some into stock this week, and I might be suspended otherwise. I assume this has gone to all Comet affiliates?

Can I have some clarification as to whether you mean promoting on PPC, or just having links my own sites? It seems rather harsh that links that I have had on my Wii site for nearly a year would need to be removed just as Comet (finally) get some more stock. I won't be PPCing, just living off natural traffic.

Can someone from AW/Comet please clarify this?

Thanks,

Steve

Wardy · 30-10-07

I think it was sent to all Comet affs.

Cheers
Wardy

stevebrowne · 31-10-07

at least I'm not being singled out ;-) But do they really want us to remove existing links after sending them traffic during the quiet periods? I do hope not, that would be pretty low...

stevebrowne · 31-10-07

Yes. It's official. They want us to remove all links to Wiis on the Comet site whilst they have stock. No doubt they want us to put the links back after they have sold out.

gunneradt · 31-10-07

that would be right

people then go and buy after the cookie's expired!!!

Qui Gon Jinn · 31-10-07

saying an affiliate will be suspended is particularly harsh, nothing like a bit of rep building just before christmas, maybe a sneaking suspicion of an own goal 0-1 .. one for the judge.

Comet Team · 31-10-07

Hello all,

We appreciate all your hard work supporting the promotion of the wii Nintendo.

However, due to limited stock we can not support the demand that our affiliates are driving which is resulting in huge waiting queues with angry customers not receiving the product they have been promised.

In order to keep our customers happy, and keep tight control of stock we are asking for your support to refrain from promoting these products until we are back to full stock levels.

Thanks again.

Esther
Esther Wrigley
Comet

stevebrowne · 31-10-07

Hi Esther -

I think that there is a line between actively promoting the availability (ie. running PPC ads to the relevent comet pages) and having to remove links from a Wii specific website that have been in place for year or so.

Other merchants get supplies of Wii's in every now and then but don't put such restrictions in place, after all is a customer following an affiliate link any different to a customer who didn't? Unless it's a sale which you don;t need to pay commission on, of course..

Your online store automatically cuts off orders when the stock is gone anyway, so people should in general not be able to order an item that isn't available (apart from some minor overspill when the status changes I suppose)

One question I have outstanding with AW is whether any existing cookies will be honoured?

I'm just a bit annoyed by this as my natural search placements are not going to get rewarded.

gadget · 31-10-07

Esther.

You accept orders for the Wii whether you're in stock or not - that's what's driving the disappointment, NOT the affiliates.

If you are concerned at the level of traffic being generated by affiliates which in turn is resulting in customers being disappointed, I assume you've also asked Google, Yahoo and MSN to remove you from their results pages?

Rather than p**s off affiliates, why don't you remove the facility for customers to actually place an order? You could add an e-mail collection page instead so that you can contact customers when you've got more stock. That way, affiliates and customers are happy-ish.

ziggyzog · 31-10-07

Hi

I think Comet should just be up front and say "we do not want to pay commission on Wii consoles" as opposed to "we don't want to disappoint our customers".

If you don't have stock, then don't take orders, it's really very simple.

It will be interesting to see that when stock shows on the Comet website, whether I can ring up and order a Wii package over the telephone without any problems.

stevebrowne · 31-10-07

... and also whether there are any Comet PPC adverts running from Comet themselves or closed bidding groups.