Mothercare Tradedoubler Shambles

[roarer02]

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Like many affiliates I was astonished when Mothercare moved to Tradedoubler of all places.

Since they have done so Ive gone from making £500 to £1000 monthly on Mothercare to making around £50 per month.

Im pretty peed off as this is exactly what i feared when they changed network. I dutifully spent 30 odd hours changing all my buy.at links to TD deep links a couple of months ago. Fat lot of good its done - traffic is at an all time high and conversions almost non-existent.

Then today I see this email from TD:

Mothercare - Deep-linking fixed

We are pleased to announce that the deep-linking generator is now fixed with TradeDoubler. We hope this will help you push the program and earn more commissions.

If you have any questions or suggestions please get in touch and we would be happy to help.

Many thanks,

Mothercare Affiliate Team

So deep linking was broken? First ive heard of it. My deep links arent working at all now. Will someone at TD update all my new deep links for me. Will TD pay me the £1000 odd Im out of pocket.

More importantly, will mothercare please move to a decent network - Awin for example. Why the hell did they leave Buy.at

Shocking.

[PaulLL]

I'm glad you've posted this. Well, not glad at all as it sounds like you've got every right to be angry, but I'm glad to see I'm not alone or going mad.

It's nowhere near you're scale, but I normally make an around £150 - £250 a month from Mothercare. Consistently, for well over a year. Since the switch, I've made £35.00.

The email this morning has just confused me even more - I thought my deep links were working (or at least, they were when I tested them all after changing all the links to tradedoubler!)

I've just tested a few now and they're working, but there's a horrible few seconds where it shows the Mothercare logo and 'redirecting to product page'. Doesn't look very professional at all, and I'm sure people must be closing the browser.

Arrrrgggh. I'm so fed up.

[tdMatt]

Hello Paul and roarer,

Thank you for your comments on the Mothercare program.

I have contacted the account executive and the member of the tech team responsible for Mothercare to ask them to investigate this for you. Unfortunately they are not currently available to post a reply but I can assure you they will be looking at the matter closely.

I or another member of staff will post an update here before 6pm with the latest information.

Regards
tdMatt

[Fraser]

I'd like to add my complaints on this issue too.

I reported a problem on 30th November and was told that there are no issues. I go in touch again on 17th December and again I was told it's fine. I've always been using the links provided in the feed.

Clearly the program hasn't been right since it moved to TD and I look forward to hearing about what's been going on and how affiliates will be compensated.

[TD_Agency]

Dear All,

Thanks for your feedback on the Mothercare programme. We would like to apologise for the lack of visibility on the deeplinking issue and really appreciate the time and work that you have put to migrating your links to TradeDoubler.

We are working with Mothercare to resolve the situation as a priority and will be putting a plan in place next week. We will provide you with an update as soon as we can.

Thanks for your patience.

The Mothercare Affiliate Team

[lauriebred]

This is yet another example of merchants jumping from a successful network to another one, hoping to get higher sales or lower expenses and succeeding only in p***ing off affiliates and slashing their online sales. At least they haven't forced Buyat into a prepack receivership, which is one small mercy.

Insurance for tradesmen at Internet rates

[Elaine]

I'm waiting for the response from Tradedouble with interest

[MattSweet]

It's more worrying that whoever is managing the programme didn't notice all the sales dropping off. Or them not bothering to contact the affiliates' in question if they did notice.

[Sanjit]

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to let you know that I'll be picking this up as a priority on Monday morning with the team. We absolutely wish for a smooth migration to TradeDoubler for Mothercare and will ensure that this deeplinking issue is addressed ASAP.

Kind Regards

Sanj

Sanjit.Atwal@tradeDoubler.com
UK Head of Publisher Services & Development

[Mooch-Mark]

We didn't see the benefit in this move so we watched our performance carefully and noticed this issue within a few days. We've been working with TD and Mothercare who have been very open with the issues, and kept us up to date with minimal prompting.

Have to say though - announcing a solution to a problem you hadn't publically acknowleged is world class muppetry so I'm sure someone is feeling the pressure at the moment.... anyone experiencing the same problem with Currys on AWin recently will have seen a much better example of 'issue' management.

That said I get the impression that both Network and Merchant will do the right thing, after all they have ackonowledged and issue, the clicks have tracked and Mothercare have full visibility of the Buy-At performance so calculating an Affiliate's losses should be pretty straightforward.

[TDVictoria]

Hi Everyone,

We wanted to get in touch and apologise for any confusion here, totally understand that the messaging has not been clear enough and I hope that we can give you a bit more insight into the situation and solution now.....

At the beginning of February we realised that a small number of affiliates were experiencing lower conversion rates on the Mothercare programme following migration from Buy.at and started a technical audit to identify why this could be occurring. We subsequently identified that a number of the product links were not tracking correctly and set about fixing these in conjunction with the Mothercare technical team. The direct links were unaffected during this period and have been tracking correctly throughout.

I am happy to confirm that as of the 25th February the product tracking was fixed and is now working correctly.

If you have any questions regarding the product link structure on the Mothercare programme or TradeDoubler interface in general please do not hesitate to contact us at mothercare@tradedoubler.com – we would be happy to talk you through the process or arrange a one-to-one meeting here at the TradeDoubler offices to address any specific queries you may have in more detail.

We are here to support all affiliates who promote Mothercare and eager to speak with you if you have any queries, concerns or crazy new ideas on how you would like to promote the brand!

We would like to apologise again for the confusion and look forward to working with you over the coming months.

Many thanks,
Victoria on behalf of the Mothercare affiliate team
mothercare@tradedoubler.com

[thai_king]

Yep same problem here, on Buy.at was at over £100 a month for Mothercare, same traffic and now earned £2.50 from the end of Jan to now (over 1.5 months).

I didnt even get an email to say there were problems with deep linking?! Just done a Google search and noticed this thread. Well done to TD, what a mess you have made of a great programme.

Are you willing to pay me commission for your cock ups?!? Thinking of just taking Mothercare off my sites now for the time being while it is handled by the guys at TD.

[Mooch-Mark]

Hi Thai-King

I have to say that Victoria and the guys at Mothercare have been excellent in dealing with our issues, but then we didn't call them names.

As a point of clarity are you questioning the size of their gene pool or suggesting that they reside in a loaf

I'm sure you'll find an amicable solution...

[thai_king]

Yep I understand, was just pissed off with lost commission and have had no contact from TD at all. I'm just going to take Mothercare off my sites and replace with another merchant. Think it was the gene pool, but should really of had spell check on (too early)

[TDClaudia]

Hi Thai-King,

The tracking issue was resolved at the end of February, can you please send us your site ID and we will investigate further.

Many thanks,
Claudia
mothercare@tradedoubler.com