Affiliate Marketers Beware. Intellichat Sales Agent Steals Your Commissions!
Here’s an urgent warning to all fellow Affiliate Marketers.
Please take immediate action in your own interest and check the sites and products you are promoting.
You are in great danger to loose your commissions due to a new exit traffic pop-up used by many merchants already.
This pop-up is evoked by the Intellichat Automated Sales Agent.
You can testdrive this tool at their site.
Basically it will sense when a visitor will leave the site he’s on, and then offers him a discount with a sort of “intelligent chat”, which is done by a clever software.
If the visitor will accept this discount, you will see no comission, null, zero, nada, niente, zilch!
Even if you’ve brought the visitor via your own Affiliate Links!
Go ahead and do test it:
- check which of your merchants runs this Automated Sales Agent
- visit his site via one of your Affiliate Links
- do a test buy to see if you’re credited for the sale as affiliate, which should normally happen (like for instance hit the “buy now” button and continue with the transaction until you see your affiliate id in the “usual” place)
- then refresh your browser, clear the cokies, reload the site through your affiliate Link again - or perhaps just use another browser to go to the site through your affiliate link again
- pretend you’re going to leave the site by clicking the back button or one of your bookmarks
- watch the Automated Sales Agent pop-up appear
- play around or chat with him or her as you like for a while
- accept the discount offered by the the Automated Agent
- procede with the transaction and lookout for your affiliate id to show up somewhere
- check the result transaction closely
- perhaps like me, in case of a sale via Clickbank, you too will find: “Affiliate= None”!
IMHO that’s simply not right!
Some merchants might think it’s a clever move to use this free tool right now.
But what about their Affiliates? They simply get nothing, although they brought the prospect …
I won’t promote any product or site using the Intellichat Automated Sales Agent from now on.
And you should do the same, if you don’t want to waste time, effort and perhaps even money if you ‘re doing Pay-Per-Click-Campains.
To Your success
Michael
PS: I contactet Intellichat about the issue. They claim to let original affiliates keep their credit. Perhaps they talk about the afffiliates of Intellichat. Because my own findings just proove this claim wrong. I still wait for a new answer of them, and will keep you posted. So stay tuned …
In between - perhaps you could do some tests too and let me know your results via a comment?
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Ripp-Off, Affiliate Warning, Business Building Basics, Commission Ripp-Off, Commission Theft, Intellichat Automated Sales Agent
4 comments
Hey thanks a lot for the heads up! I’ll absolutely check this out from now on whenever I see those intellichat windows.
Tim’s last blog post..Drupal to Wordpress Migration In Progress
Hey,
thanks for this …. I read some where but didn’t understood… now I got it. Let me check my programs.
Jennie
Chaya Jennifer’s last blog post..Make Money Online - by freelance programming
Beware doing cheap test drives like the one you describe above, Michael. You’re still sitting on your own computer with eventually the same IP address. And there are other very sophisticated tracking technologies available the companies use nowadays in order to capture folks like you as a fraud! Therefore, no sale.
Sure, it can be what you mention it would be, but still… affiliate fraud is an issue many companies face today and fight against.
~Marcus
Marcus Hochstadt’s last blog post..It’s The Hochstadt.com Party Contest!
Marcus,
thanks for your comment.
It shows me that my words might be mistaken or misleading.
Because they seem to have send your thoughts in the “wrong” direction.
Affiliate Fraud is a serious issue, as it harms Affiliates as well as Merchants
And by no means would i support it, commit it myself or suggest anybody else to do so.
So asking other Affiliates to do tests on their own, wasn’t a call to criminal action at all.
Nor was my own test illegal or “cheap” in any way.
It was a thorough simulation of a buying process via an Affiliate Link.
There was no real sales happening.
The test and its results are repeatable.
But even buying via one’s own Affiliate link wouldn’t necessarily be fraudulent, as there are a lot of Affiliate programs explicitly allowing this.
The ugly truth is, there is not only Affiliate Fraud happening, but also Merchant Fraud to a great extend. And this case wouldn’t be the first one i proove.
Many Affiliates loose their comissions not only because they don’t safeguard and track their promotion properly, but also because of Merchant Fraud.
And most don’t even have a clue why their Affiliate Links get thousands of hits, but no sales show up in the merchants statistics.
I specialize in Affiliate Marketing and help Affiliates earn more.
There are many ways to do so.
One way is to fight Merchant Fraud.
Regards,
Michael
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