Duplication/Reject Practices

[john-pp]

Is there a generally accepted industry standard practice when it comes to rejecting leads for duplication?

Actually I'll rephrase my question.. Shouldn't there be a fair (to both merchant and affiliate) procedure for handling duplication?

I ask this for two reasons:
1) We run our own affiliate programmes and we'd like to treat our affiliates fairly
2) We act as affiliates for other merchants and ... (you guessed!) we'd like to be treated fairly!

Of course I'm not talking about standard duplication rejections eg:
Scenario (a):
applicant x applies for a secured loan but already exists on merchant y's secured loan system - lead is useless to merchant so rejection reason is valid.

What I'm talking about are these examples:
Scenario (b):
applicant x applies for a payday loan but already exists on merchant y's secured personal loan system. The lead is not useless to the merchant who goes on to provide applicant x with their payday loan.

Scenario (c):
Applicant x applies for car finance but already exists on network z’s mortgage system, network z sells the lead to merchant n as car finance or a loan application.

Now the way I see it is that to reject scenario (b) for duplication is unfair to the affiliate on the grounds that this customer, albeit already known to the merchant, would not necessarily have gone back to said merchant for the other product/service.

To reject scenario (c) for duplication is unfair to the affiliate on the grounds that although the applicant is known to the network – he is not known to the merchant the lead is eventually sold to.

Obviously in all business practices you need to strike a fair balance, with us in particular the situation is even more salient because we have to meet it from both sides of the fence.

BTW - this isn't hypothetical, we deal with merchants/networks who regularly reject leads who then go on to make good use of them and feel this is an unfair practice.

What do you guys think?
Plus... any networks/merchants out there that can put a more practical argument from their angle?

[emmalaffey]

I competely agree with what you are saying, there should be some principles in place. I buy and sell a lot of data, with different companies having different rules when it comes to data dupes & rejects.

You need to make it clear what you class a a dupe/reject in a contact with any one your buy data from and put seeds in your data to ensure its not being misused. It's the only way but you will be surprised how many just pass it on anyway but word your contract right, and they won't do it again if they respect the relationship. Also, tell them you will be putting seeds in the data. .