Freemans, Grattan & Kaleidoscope

[Retail-Therapy]

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Has anyone had any sales with these three, I've pushed them a little, but after sending 1,200 odd visitors between them since joining mid-june, not a sniff of a sale, perhaps I'm expecting too much.

Grattan 517 visitors
Freemans 638 visitors
Kaleidoscope 104 visitors

[Bod]

added some links the other day to see how well they performed against CJ and nothing. havent checked the stats yet.

[Kandevil]

added some stuff for them today and from seeing 51 clicks from 227 adwords impressions at 22.4% CTR haven't had a sale yet

Expect at least 2 sales really (on POR btw)

[Retail-Therapy]

Hmm, can only compare them against LX direct on buy.at, additions and kays on cj where I'm getting on average 1 sale per 100 visitors. Somethings not right?

[jess1]

Hi Ya

huston we have a problem, (nope all the tracking is fine) But this may explain a few things....

Dear Affiliate Partners,

Since launching our three affiliate programmes (Kaleidoscope, Freemans and Grattan) we have been very pleased with traffic and the numbers of new customers we have recruited. Many thanks to all the affiliate partners who have put in so much work promoting our brands.

However, the service we have been giving to our partners has been well below the standard we need to set.

Here's what went wrong:

We built technology to identify orders that were invalid so we could have an automated report and partners would have regular and reliable updates. This is important, as a significant number of our new customers sign up for credit accounts. A proportion of these fail, as you would expect.

We tested this before launch, and were confident it would meet our requirements. However, shortly after launch we realised there were some inconsistencies with our tracking of order numbers. This problem has been much more complex to solve that we originally thought.

Here's what we are doing to fix things:

Our number one priority is to make sure no affiliate loses out financially. We are producing manual reports, hence the long delays between updates. We hope to automate this process this week.

We are absolutely committed to our affiliate partners and would like to be a benchmark for best-practice among UK merchants. Clearly we are not living up to that ambition at the moment, but we are doing our best to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.

I should make it clear that these problems have been caused by back-end systems, and that Jessica, our brilliant affiliate manager has been doing a sterling job in difficult circumstances while we tried to isolate the problem.

We'll keep you updated while we smooth out these teething problems. Many, many apologies for the inconvenience we have caused you.

Chris

Chris Poad
Senior Business Development Manager
Otto UK

+44 (0)1274 625964
Email: chris.poad@otto-uk.com
Web: www.ottogroup.com

Visit us at:
www.kaleidoscope.co.uk
www.freemans.com
www.grattan.co.uk
www.lookagain.co.uk
www.montage.co.uk

[Retail-Therapy]

However, shortly after launch we realised there were some inconsistencies with our tracking of order numbers.

It would have been nice to know a little sooner, rather than having a problem confirmed after noticing something myself.

Tony

[jess1]

Yes I agree.... but if one is told that the problem will be fixed one assumes that the problem will be fixed! How ever, most sales in July will be validated, apart from the the very obviouse fraudulent ones so no one looses out, nor did you loose out last month. So really the only thing that has affected any one is getting a true conversion %. I actually think this is really cool of The Otto Group... but yes communication is king!

Going forwards, we have a full-time affiliate manager starting with us soon so this should get things moving again.

Jess

[Retail-Therapy]

Do you know if theres a timescale to when we'll see these transactions appearing in POR Jess?

[jess1]

According to Chris re credit reports its imminent... I am hoping that it will be early next week... ill keep you posted. But I will authorise POR to display all commissions by tomorrow...hang in there.

Jess

[aus]

I moved from POR to CJ cause I was disappointed there were no sales and now that I am on CJ the sales are coming.

I guess this thread explains why I saw no sales through POR

[jess1]

Sales will be made visible.. going forward.

[Retail-Therapy]

After not seeing anything appearing, I guess I'm either unlucky, or somethings still not right, I'll swap out my links to CJ and see if anything happens over there, then get back to you with the results.

Tony

[jess1]

Hi Ya

Sos for the delay, I was on holiday with my family.

This should be sorted out now... you should be able to see everything.

When the program was set up, we wanted affiliates to only see the sales that had already gone through the credit checks and all valid. We felt that this would be more beneficial to the affiliates rather then seeing all the declined transactions. CJ unfortunately could not accomodate this system (yet). We knew that through CJ, Affiliates would be able to see all their sales and all their declined transactions, for most savvy catalogue affiliates, this would not have been an issue but we would still have preferred the other route...that POR was able to support, so when we said no clawback, through the POR system, this would have been the case. Our problem was that we could not get the credit reports ( the files that has bad CCs and declined credit check, transactions removed) to work properly, this meant that affiliates could not see their stats via POR until I did a manual approval. To cut a long story short, the credit reports are going to be tested (not on a live site) early next week.

As I said before, no affiliate ever lost out the only thing you could not see were the true conversions which any affiliate doing any PPC needs to see, which is why we bit the bullet and paid all commissions regardless.

Many apologies from us all.

Going forward, as you maybe aware, my contract with OTTO should have come to a close in June, how ever there were unforseen circumstances which led me to working for OTTO on a part-Time basis which was far from ideal. So I am delighted to be able to hand over the job to Rob Tokolics, OTTO's full time affiliate manager. Some of you will know Rob already, I have known Rob for a very long time and his experience and understanding of the affiliate marketing industry is in-depth. Another pioneer of affiliate marketing in the UK and I am really so pleased that Rob will be taking this project forwards.

Thanks for all your support

Jess

[Kandevil]

Things look much better now the manual update has been done

So are we still on manual approval on POR at the moment? How often do you envisage updates?

[jess1]

Hi Ya

I will be discussing this with Rob on Wednesday, I would have thought that for this month we just take out the obvious dodgy transaction and do what we did last month, which will be to update all commissions as of next week, but I need to have a chat with Rob as he will be making the final decision and I dont want to step on his toes