In my few years as an affiliate I have terminated several affiliate relationships with merchants for typical reasons such as I couldn’t get the merchants products to convert or I had joined a program in haste and quickly discovered the merchant really wasn’t a good match for my style of affiliate marketing. But I’ve never terminated an affiliate relationship with a merchant based solely on the performance of the affiliate manager, until now.
It goes without saying that it’s the affiliate managers responsibility to communicate with his affiliates, and to an even greater degree owes it to the merchant, anything otherwise and the manager isn’t doing his job.
So on with my story of how I delightfully terminated my relationship with this merchant. I launched a new affiliate website in November 2010, and this website is successful from the start with over $15,000 in sales in the first three weeks, not great but no so bad. So with great enthusiasm I join several merchant programs that I think are going to be a good fit for this new website. One of those merchants is Appalachian Outdoors located in State College, Pennsylvania.
I thought the program would be a perfect fit because –
- Appalachian Outdoors has good prices on many popular products in comparison to many other merchants.
- They have an inventory of popular products that other merchants seem to rarely have in inventory.
- I’ve purchased at the retail store and their customer service always went out of their way to treat me right, so I felt an honest desire and obligation to help this merchant build their affiliate program.
With all those good points about the merchant said, next are the events that helped me make the decision to terminate the affiliate relationship.
Communication Attempt #1
In an effort to introduce myself to the manager I sent an email to him requesting any suggestions of a starting point with the merchant. I received no response.
Communication Attempt #2
About two weeks later I send a follow up email to the affiliate manager, and again I received no response.
Communication Attempt #3
About a week later I begin to wonder if the affiliate program is actually active, or maybe the affiliate manager has been replaced, so I call the merchant and start asking questions. Turns out the merchant doesn’t know who the affiliate manager is and never heard of the person listed as the affiliate manager at the network. The merchant then checks her affiliate information and states that I’m not even listed as an affiliate. Merchant says she’ll figure out what’s going on and will get back to me soon. I never hear from her again.
Communication Attempt #4
About a week after that I contact the affiliate network asking if the merchants program was active and explaining that I was not receiving communication or assistance from the affiliate manager or the merchant. The network then attempts to contact the manager, copying me on the email. Still I get no response.
Final Communication
Several days later I still heard nothing, so I logged into the affiliate network, located that merchant and pressed the “Terminate Relationship” button. I then sent an email to the merchant and affiliate manager to inform them in a nice way, “You’re Terminated F***er!”
Now I’m certainly not one of those super affiliate coupon websites that would’ve sold millions of dollars for this merchant, and in fact I never even made it beyond joining this merchants affiliate program, but from my standpoint where the dysfunction occured is it wasn’t really the merchant who ignored my communication as that is the function of the affiliate manager. And it was a poor judgement call made by the manager that I’m sure the merchant will not be happy about if it becomes a habit.
Who’s at fault? Certainly not me, as I made a major effort to work with this merchants affiliate program. And the final result is that it’s too bad for Appalachian Outdoors loss, and I will simply continue to double my affiliate sales every year for those merchants who work with me and not against me.
Comments on this entry are closed.