Comet - Nintendo Wii

[stevebrowne]

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]

I think it was sent to all Comet affs.

Cheers
Wardy

[stevebrowne]

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]

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]

that would be right

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

[Qui Gon Jinn]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Esther,

Please you could address why it was even necessary mention that affiliates might be "suspended" otherwise? Politely asking affiliates to refrain from proactively promoting wii's & the reasons pertaining would have sufficed.

[renegade]

We don't do many console sales at all but it's not practical to remove intergrated content from our websites.
Following the email I won't actively promote Wii's (I didn't anyway) but the wording was very heavy-handed and the threat is impractical.
Would you suspend an affiliate who sends general traffic to Comet that ends up buying a Wii?
A better solution would be to clearly explain to anyone ordering what the stock level is on the Wii page and let them decide - they can't be dissappointed if they go ahead and order when they know it's out of stock.
The only problem would be to pretend you have stock and take orders, then it's your fault you have unhappy customers, not ours.

[Comet Team]

Dear Affiliates

Firstly may I take this opportunity to apologise for the the inconvenience this has caused you.

To clarify, Comet has never advertised the Wii on any search engine, any price comparison site, or indeed, in any offline advertising. And therefore the only channel that the business has allowed to promote the Wii has been the Affiliate channel.

Due to update limitations on the Comet site (auto updates once a day and manual updates that take 30 minutes aren't instant), the minor overspill has actually turned into a major problem, putting our call centre and stores under an enormous amount of pressure. Our priority at Comet is to offer the best customer service that we are able to deliver and it is with this in mind that we would ask you once again to remove links advertising the Wii console.

We understand this is difficult and will honour any outstanding cookie. Let us assure you that this decision has not been based on anything other than the desire to resolve the present customer service issue.

Kind regards
Esther
Comet

[stevebrowne]

Hi Esther -

Thank you for the reply. I didn't realise that there was a delay on the stock availability, so I understand the issue you have. Of course, depending on supply you could simply turn it on and then off immediately to allow a 30 minute period of sales, and then again later if it works out. Amazon have done this sort of thing to good effect in the past as it builds up lots of people hanging around your site waiting and checking.

Thanks for the clarification about cookies. I have pushed all Comet links to the bottom with "DO NOT CLICK" on them.