3 Mobile Affiliates - Worst Performing Mobile Merchant?

[Ballswinger]

I'm interested to find out from other affiliates of the 3 Mobile Direct program how their stats compare with the other mobile merchants they deal with.

Our stats for this program are the worst in the industry which just doesn't add up, across an average of 20+ programs we run at around a 54 - 62% approval rate but with 3 Mobile this is NOWHERE NEAR.



Looking at the above snapshot we've even got pending sales from as far back as October! - You'd hope the customer might have got their phone by now?

Admittedly the network direct programs are nowhere near as profitable as the retailers but 3 Mobile is WAY off the mark even compared with these, their main competition.

The whole 'de-duping' process is an affiliates nightmare and I challenge you to calculate an ROI based on these stats - pending sales from October included LOL

Are others seeing similar stats or is it time for us to shut down this program?

Looking forward to your views.

[Top banana]

3 used to be the best mobile affiiate programme for me. I used to make a lot of money but over the last year or so it has gone down hill. The decline % has gone from about 40%-50% to 65%-75%, plus the commission have been cut at various times.

When on the in-house programme I had a lot of pending sales which were over 3 months old, when i asked for them to be processed, they were and all were declined, funny that. I dont trust their in-house programme at all. So went back to Buy.at even though it pays 20% less per sale.

[mobiles4everyone]

Andrew, 3 are one of the poorest performers for me. To start with lots of sales go untracked, click off CR is around 3% but it used to be consistantly higher at around 6-7% so something has gone wrong there.

Then there's the abysmal decline rate, last six months have seen decline rates range from 64% to 76%. Everyone else's decline rate is around 35-50%. In terms of EPC, out of 20 mobile merchants they rank 19th, just ahead of The Carphone Warehouse.

At the other end of the scale, Mobiles.co.uk, Buymobilephones.net, Mobile Phone Central and Dialaphone perform very well.

[Norras]

I'm getting over 98% of sales rejected (via Buy.at) and most are for Pay-as-you-go, therefore presumably no credit check to pass.

It looks to me like 3 Mobile are simply stealing our commission.

Is there anything we can do about it?

Cheers

Nick

[bewise]

I have the same problem. I have sales from August that are still in pending status and the amount just keeps on rising, we are talking thousands now! I am on the Buy.at program, but they have been very helpful with me. From what I understand they are just as frustrated as we are.

Their decline rate is abysmal and their approval rate is such as bad. I think the only thing that we can do is collectively join together and get a few of the major affiliates out there to pull their deals on our sites until they rectify it! I did this in the gambling sector a few years ago and you would be surprised how quickly they pull their acts together. If anybody is interested in joining me on this one please send me a pm and we can get something moving! All we affiliates ask for is a level playing field and at the moment I honestly don't think 3 are playing fair!

[Ballswinger]

This is an awkward one, if it were ever proved that 3 Mobile were 'cherry picking' deals from submitted affiliate leads then how can the trust ever be regained?

No sooner than 24 hours after I first started this thread ALL pending sales from over 30 days were 'removed' from my stats!

They are obviously watching this thread - maybe a reply might help ease the situation?

On the flipside, this could be a case of "use 'em or lose em", with Orange direct pulling out of the affiliate market in January not being able to make it work for them, although this was mainly down to non competitive deals.

Both Orange and 3 Mobile direct do offer bespoke deals and handsets that add value to our consumer offerings, ie: INQ1 and W910i Pink not available on contract with the retailers.

I don't think 3 Mobile take affiliate marketing seriously enough to worry about dropping out all together, with the minimal commissions they currently offer they obviously do not value affiliates as the retailers do.

Any others have any thoughts?

[affiliatemarketingltd]

when i had my mobile site i actually had a person contact me so i know they bought a phone but funnily enough 3 havent paid out .. and it was a PAYG phone too

so im well aware that they do cherry pick what to pay

[bewise]

Sadly I don't think that they are the only merchant doing this. Anybody in this industry knows which merchants are good to affiliates and which ones aren't. I guess for the ones where we don't make up a significant number of their overall sales then as you say it's a case of 'use em or lose em'... which I think is a shame and in the long run will only stand to benefit other more pro affiliate retailers.

[Richard Forster]

HI guys i can appreciate your frustrations and points of view, allot has stemmed from confusion which come from the de-duplicaiton model which is now in place with buy.at and the statuses the transactions pass through before they are ready to be acceptted or rejected. I appreciate you know there is a certain level of dropoff when such a system comes into play and that you are all professionals in the space so im not going to patronise anyone on that score.

In terms of pending sales from August they will be resolved by COP- there have been some accounting issues due to old systems and new de-duping systems to adjudge which sales needed to be processed in what manner.

Again im not going to teach anyone to suck eggs as you know there are a number of general reasons why a mobile phone transactions can be rejected on a net connect basis, and even more granular reasons due to the nature of the mobile industry. The solution 3 Mobile and buy.at are working towards is a simpler de-duplicaiton and approval process and ideally more transparency on the reason why sales are rejected.

Apologies that this reply doesn’t give any specific resolutions, into 2009 3 Mobile and buy.at will work hard together to improve the programme- as you all know the consumer propositions are very strong so i really want to make sure you guys can make as much money out of selling 3 Mobile as we can facilitate.

Many thanks,

[bewise]

Hi Richard,
I can appreciate your comments on the issue and I know that you have affiliates best interests at heart, and this rant is not aimed at you in any way at all. The simple fact of the matter is that, as one of the most profitable routes to market, generating the best ROI's of any other sales and marketing channel, it seems only fair that we are treated with respect and furthermore are paid a respectable rate for the work that we carry out on a merchants behalf. I think for a company the size of 3 mobile, to not clear commissions from the beginning of August is simply not acceptable. If the affiliate marketing channel is not worth much to 3 then perhaps we (as affiliates) should collectively decide not to promote them until the situation is resolved.

Again Richard I know you are in the same boat as us, trying to find out answers as to why there are such high decline rates. But the amount of commission that remains in pending mounts by the month and as a small business it makes managing cashflow a great difficulty. If (as somebody else has mentioned) all the pending commissions are rejected, that would mean a devistatingly high rejection rate and would make it simply impossible to promote 3 as a merchant any longer! I'm afraid there is only so many times that we can be told that things are being looked into, that a solution is trying to be found, that you (3) are working to provide a simpler deduping process that we can take before we say goodbye to promoting them at all. I know of a few others that feel this way!

I would like to stress that this post is aimed at 3 mobile rather than Richard, who I know is working on our behalf to find a solution.

Thanks Richard

Now my rant is over I think I might go and enjoy christmas! Merry Christmas all and here's to getting paid in 2009.

[moshin]

What do you make of this Christmas cracker?

I had about £3000+ in commissions pending accumulated since August for sales I delivered to 3 Mobile. I wrote a few emails and support tickets every other week and waited patiently to get this resolved. I appreciate the staff being busy and not being able to reply my emails. Now I just logged in to my account and I'm shocked to see someone has finally bothered to cheer me up by sending only £58 my way out of the £3000+ in pending, the rest has vanished. I wonder what happened to the rest of the balance?

I have tried contacting the account managers with no success as the emails are bouncing back from their inboxes.

Some of the reminders I have tried to send via support tickets and emails:
__________________________________________________ _____
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: RE: Communication problems
Sent: 23/12/2008 19:11
__________________________________________________ _____
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: FW: Communication problems
Sent: 22/12/2008 09:07
__________________________________________________ _____
[ #RTX-56492-884]: Payment Enquiry on Dec 1
__________________________________________________ _____
[ #FOQ-45827-512]: Payment Enquiry on Nov 27
__________________________________________________ _____
[ #PSW-58844-360]: Payment Enquiry on Nov 13


Now I want to ask the people reading this post. Is this a normal conversion rate for 3 Mobile at Buy.at these days? or Could this be a system bug? At least the Buy.at staff could have noticed this 5 month delay in validations and an extraordinary conversion rate when the validations came through from the merchant. I can't even see my saved reports properly, I have no idea what’s happening.

Also I would like to ask affiliates when they got validations for "Free Laptop" sales incurred in August? And what percentage of their sales were approved?

Any help and suggestions from Buy.at or fellow affiliates who have dealt with similar problems will be highly appreciated.

[3_Mobile]

Hello everyone.

Well, I had hoped to be making my first post under more friendly circumstances but there are obviously some key points that need addressing here straight away.

By way of a short introduction, my name is Adam and I head up the affiliate channel for 3.

I have to say that the underlying point about rejection rates and deduping doesn't come as any surprise. For what it's worth to you, I actually used to be a 3 affiliate myself and had the unenviable task of trying to forecast rejection rates, and allocate a monthly 6-figure spend on what was mostly a moving scale month to month - I truly understand what you guys are up against and I'm as desperate as you to make the programme better. I wouldn't expect you to invest whole heartedly into something you couldn't work out your ROI on. 2009 for me is all about getting affiliate confidence back to where it should be. There's no skeletons in our cupboard, so to speak - that I am sure. Against what some have suggested here, 3 is not out to fleece its affiliates. Mirroring my own personal ethics, 3 is as transparent as it can be. If we find a problem, we set out to fix it and make things better. That's why I'm confident we can fix all the genuine issues listed here. Of course it will take time, but if you're open with us and keep communication coming (as a lot of you have been - thank you) we can make sure we are prioritising the right things to focus on. I'm sure most of you realise that I have to balance affiliate requests against a wider corporate direction so expect some compromise, however that's my job and I'm proud about some of things that have happened over the past 6-months, although I realise we're a way off perfection!

Right, the nitty gritty...

The appalling rejection rate. Agreed, on paper it's not good enough but there are some legitimate reasons for this. I'm going to come back to deduping but outside of that, focussing on more normal rejections, times have changed. There's so much going on it's hard to pick a start point to discuss. One thing that stands out to me is how our affiliates still treat 3's performance as simply '3'. Not 3 contract, not 3 pay as you go, not 3 broadband, not 3 laptops - just 3. 3 has now outgrown its original foundations as a mobile phone network - we're now an ISP too. And even the relatively new side of the Mobile Broadband business has already spawned its own offspring with Laptop bundles. My point is that each of these product areas behaves completely differently and there's value for you to look a bit deeper, rather than completely writing us off.

To illustrate I've looked at the figures for November which have just been completed. It may interest you to know that the average approval rate over the affiliate channel for our Mobile Broadband is a fantastic 69.4%. Compare this to our laptop bundle products which achieved just 29.8% approval in November (our hardest product to convert to an approved sale). The main reason there is so much difference is that once you bolt on a £500 quid laptop to our Mobile Broadband, it becomes a whole lot riskier for us to send it out at the point we receive say £30 for the first month. There's a lot more to it obviously - and above my head for the most of it - but the principle is clear. If the financial risk is higher for us, then the consumer credit check (the bit that claims the most casualties in the approval process) will be that much harder to complete.

To clarify the point once more, it's wrong to generalise over 3's products - it would be wiser to make decisions at a product type level.

Additionally, you have to believe me when I say that your results (dedupe aside) mirror our own. If you're losing a sale to a failed credit check, then we are losing a sale to a failed credit check - we receive no return. If I can be so bold, why should 3 pay you for a consumer that wants one of our products, but can't afford to purchase it on paper? You can be assured that because both yours and our success are based on getting consumers signed up to the network, that we are doing everything we can behind the scenes to improve the situation. This isn't an affiliate problem.

This leads me onto a sideline. I'm sure many of you will have twigged that we're hardly in a great position re credit quality in the UK right now. The fact is that many people around the UK are starting to lose their clean credit ratings for various reasons - not paying bills for one. This obviously has a negative affect on our business as more and more potential consumers slip into a 'risky' category. I'm not pointing my finger at the affiliates for one second - I know that day to day there's very little the majority of you can do to control the quality of the traffic that you send us - however do you really expect us to pay you for a failed transaction now we have the technology to report accurately?

I suppose this leads on to whether we follow others and consider paying on an app, or lead. It would give you the visibility/dependability that I know you're after, although financially it would lead to less accuracy as the CPAs would be averages based on average approval rates. My concern with this is that if we went down an averages route, we could effectively be paying the affiliates with the best quality traffic less, and the affiliates with the worst quality traffic more. Surely there's no-one suggesting that that makes good business sense? Above that, it doesn't seem fair on the affiliates that have already worked hard to improve their quality. Contrary to what has been said here, I think we do try to look after our affiliates.

Difficult decision this. What are your thoughts? What difference would it make to your affiliate model if we paid on app?

Reporting - this is where it gets a little confusing to explain as we effectively have two reporting suites - a Direct one and one on Buy.at. I believe it's the latter that's sparked some of the commetns above.

Part of the reason 3 opened up a direct programme was that it believed it could do some things better. Reporting is one that has flourished since we took full control. As we hold the data we can effectively report on whatever the affiliate wants. So today for example, on the direct programme, you can view the various statuses of sales as they pass through the approval process - including dedupe. Also, we have used the data to provide tools such as the Top Sellers report, giving you a live Top 5 for all our product types - both your own and the overall channel - so that you can better optimise your own traffic and make sure you are promoting the best sellers - hourly if you like! [sorry, I've gone off on a bit of a sales pitch there!]. Where I'm going is, because going in house has opened up the realms of what is possible to us, we're probably starting to struggle in forcing some of that into the existing platform on Buy.at - so we've had to make some compromises. It's not a poor reflection on Buy.at - we've just become a bit difficult.

It's apparent from this that not all of you are aware of the status process on Buy.at. It's obvious to me that the wording in the interface is not clear and we need to improve on it. I warn you now, the outcome of this next bit isn't good but by way of an explanation, when deduping was introduced in the first half of this year 3 and Buy.at had to come up with a solution to report the additional deduping part of the approvals process - received daily. As I understand it, and Richard will correct me if I'm wrong, as per the comments within the interface, within 48 hours Pending sales will transfer to a status of Held if they 'pass' through the deduping process. This means that pending sales after 48 hours have effectively failed the deduping process. So yes, I can see why you would have Pending sales in Buy.at reporting for August, etc. These are sales that have failed dedupe. These should have been house kept, but that aside I hold my hands up and admit that this process is in need of clarity and improvement and I'm personally sorry that I had to wait for you to highlight the problems for me to see it. I will be working with Richard and the Buy.at team to resolve this. I can assure you that the data has been handled correctly and that you have received the correct approval rate. Pending sales after any amount of time will no doubt be rejected in the clean up process. As I say, we'll make this a priority to correct.

In terms of working out your return quick enough to make business decisions - this is something that I hear again and again, in addition to my own experience when I was an affiliate. I realise that you are not going to promote 3 as hard as you might if you aren't fairly confident on how the programme will perform. In essence this comes down to how quickly we can report on your sales.

The problem as it stands is that we have to wait a minimum of 14 days from when an item is dispatched before we can approve it - the reason for this is that we offer a 14 day money back returns policy to all our web customers. Therefore until that period clocks up we currently won't approve a sale - so straight away best case reporting on approvals is limited to 14/15-days minimum. Not ideal. I can't offer an immediate solution however this has been on my radar for some time and we're closer to a solution than we ever have been - once we can get past this hurdle there's a lot more we can do to speed things up. I realise some of you are tired of the promises but that's all I have for you right now.

Additionally, at this time we're looking at a completely new process for approving sales. The data is the same but there's room to tighten the SLA's on how long it takes to deliver this to you. I would like to think that the first improvements will be in place sometime in January. Please await the communication.

This area of speeding up reporting is most probably my number one priority at present - do you think it should be? What are your thoughts?

Deduping - like it or not, the introduction of deduping technology from the main tracking providers has probably changed the affiliate industry forever. It was never going to be an enjoyable transition but we have successfully implemented this within 3. Personally, I feel that we have now created a deduping situation that is as fair and transparent as this process can ever be. We have made some big internal decisions to make sure that our affiliates do not unfairly miss out on justified revenue. When we launched deduping the average dedupe rate for affiliates was a loss of 30% - I'm pleased to say that this is now a best case of 20% (average).

Please also understand that the introduction of deduping is not unfair to affiliates, we get the same feedback from our PPC and Display Advertising agencies. All parties lost sales when deduping was introduced but this was the point - to stop duplication amongst channels. I don't think it's unfair for a merchant to stop paying twice for a single sale if a solution to identify this is available. We continue to innovate and offer value to the consumer (we've launched a £9 tariff including a free quality handset today), and if we didn't run a tight ship we wouldn't be able to. More than happy to pay all of you what you deserve for a network connection.

Someone above commented that the 3 programme used to be highly profitable - I can vouch for that myself. Unfortunately those times were fuelled by inaccuracies in an infant affiliate programme and as it has matured and as 3 has learned more we've made decisions to make the affiliate channel sustainable for the future. I'm sure the majority of you would have seen these golden periods on a number of campaigns. We now have to be sustainable. I shall say no more.

Rejections can and do happen on Pay As You Go items despite the lower risk. Pay As You Go can be susceptible to a range of unique fraudulent activity including 'box breaking' so there are other fraud checks in place. I've asked for clarification from the team but high volume requests and multiple sales from the same address are both ran through checks.

I don't know where to begin on the 'cherry picking' comments. The shear numbers involved in deduping and approving thousands of sales means that it can only ever be process driven, meaning no one could ever have any 'control' over the approval rate. There are legitimate reasons why rates fluctuate, mostly out of our control. For what it's worth, I can categorically state that there is no 'cherry picking' or 'one for you, two for me' type of processing within our systems. Even if there were individuals of that kind of calibre on this side, the consequences of being found out are just not worth considering. I could not work for 3 if this kind of practice was even possible.

And lastly, does 3 take Affiliate Marketing seriously? Considering it's now nearly 11pm on the night before Christmas Eve and I'm still writing this - I can say I am. And my boss saw the opportunity to hire an ex performing affiliate (I'm not cheap :0) - so he's serious. If we could pass on half of what we've learned from the affiliates to our other sales channel, we'd be a whole lot better off, I can tell you. We wouldn't know anything if we hadn't/didn't listen to you guys.

Please keep up the feedback. This is very much a discussion.

Many thanks.

Adam
Business Development Manager - Affiliates
adam.kirby@three.co.uk

[3_Mobile]

Hi moshin,

Thanks for your comments.

For my sake, can you please be specific about your lack of a response from us. I need to find out why you haven't had a response. There's obviously a problem in communication here and we need to fix it.

I think I may have answered some of your queries in the post I've just submitted. Can you please confirm that this goes some way to explain? I'm willing to elaborate further if necessary.

Cheers

Adam

[consumerdeals]

After seeing this thread, I checked my own stats - well over a hundred transactions have gone from pending to rejected. Despite sending thousands of clicks and generating a nice number of pending sales, I find I am left with £11 for October/November.

I'm with o2, Vodafone and T-Mobile and I don't see anywhere near this number of rejections or duplications with other mobile networks, or other affiliate networks.

Seems the 3 programme is fundamentally flawed - time to remove links, I think. At least until 3 can offer some assurances that they will strive to be at least as reliable as their competitors when it comes to tracking.

[3_Mobile]

Hi consumerdeals,

Can you please confirm that we're specifically talking about sales that have been sat in Pending for an extensive period of time? I'm assuming that you make approved sales on a rolling basis ordinarily?

The sales that you talk of were 'hopefuls' were they not - driven by our lack of clarity on statuses?

Adam