1ShoppingCart Affiliate Program Not Working?

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*** UPDATE 2 April 2007 ***

The issue has now been successfully resolved, as per my followup post here.

Original Post:

I’m currently working with a client to promote a series of business events in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

We have been using 1ShoppingCart to run the shopping cart for event tickets and manage the affilate program.

Problem is, the affiliate program is not working. Affiliate sales are not being tracked – we’ve been through our settings with the 1ShoppingCart support team and their operator has acknowleged that there is a problem with affilate tracking.

However, 1ShoppingCart is not addressing this problem as a matter or priority, and are unable to give a timeframe on the fix.

I would have thought that when a major feature of your service is malfunctioning, a company would move heaven and earth to put it right, but in this case it looks like I’m mistaken.

The problem has been going on for weeks

A colleague recently promoted the World Internet Summit in Melbourne, who were also using the 1ShoppingCart affiliate system. He noticed that affiliate sales were not being recorded and asked people who had purchased via his affiliate link to email him.

My colleague contacted the merchant and they eventually credited him for his referrals (well, the ones he picked up anyway).

And this is not an isolated case. This post, [and this one] documents another case, and I notice that a representative of 1ShoppingCart has weighed in with a reply along the lines of, “it’s not our fault, it’s the merchant’s fault”. Yeah…right.

A case study on how NOT to handle complaints

This was the same tack taken by the 1ShoppingCart email support team. Despite our efforts to explain the specifics of the problem, we received inadequate templated replies along the lines of, “our system works perfectly, it must be a problem at your end”.

When we called up suport and talked the operator through the specific issue, he acknowledged that the issue is at their end, that they are aware of the issue, and are “working on it”, without being able to give a timeframe for the fix.

After all, it’s just gone 5 o’clock – the development team have gone home for the evening!

Why we’re replacing the 1 Shopping Cart Affiliate System

So far, we’ve received a great response from affiliates for the event and we’ll be holding affiliate conference calls etc. to help them promote the event and earn commissions. We owe it to our affiliates to ensure that our system is absolutely rock-solid and is correctly tracking sales.

I’m sure 1 Shopping Cart will resolve this issue in time, but we don’t have time to play with and we DON’T want dozens of affiliates to be asking where their commissions are.

My project manager Phil is currently coding an affiliate system replacement, which will be up and running within a few days.

Just one of the dramas of running time-sensitive internet marketing projects…

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World Internet Summit Wrap-up + Revisiting Marketing 101

It’s a couple of weeks since the World Internet Summit in Melbourne, and as is fairly common when you attend an event like this, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks implementing some new ideas and strategies for myself and for clients.
While the World Internet Summit is aimed primarily at the home business / small business market, there is no denying that many of the speakers and delegates are turning over some pretty impressive results – many are making 7-figure incomes online which is something that I certainly can’t claim to be doing.

So it’s “Watch. Learn. Implement.”…

Report on Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Test

In my previous post I mentioned Mike Filsaime’s test/demo of Butterfly Marketing. Suffice to say that I was suitably impressed by the elegance and efficacy of this viral-marketing-system-in-a-box.

Attendees were asked to send an email to friends, colleagues, lists etc about The Resource Report, Mike’s new compendium outlining many of the tools he uses to run his internet businesses.

About 200 people did so, triggering a “viral cascade” of people telling others about the report. 72 hours later, Mike had recorded around 11,800 signups and $12,000 in sales, purely utilising the viral effect created from those initial emails.

In my previous post I wrote that the target was 20,000 signups, but heck, 12,000 ain’t bad either.

I’ve now bought my own copy of Butterfly Marketing and have a project that I’m in the process of plugging in to the system.

Other Insights, Lessons and Reminders

A few people have asked me what I got out of the event. As is the case with many of these things, the presentations contained a few nuggets of really great information, leading into a sales pitch for bigger backend programs. Some of the insights that I found valuable were…

• ALL of the successful internet marketers who presented give a lot away for FREE. Not just newsletters and reports but also audio programs, podcasts, teleseminars, mindmaps, videos and so on. This is “Internet Marketing 101″ but you can never be reminded of the fundamentals too many times.
• Many make a relatively small percentage of their total income from front end product sales. One presenter had a $27 book that she “repackaged” in different ways (going right up to a $900 seminar-in-a-box). Of the $300,000 in sales that she made in a given time period, only around 20% came from the book – the other 80% was from upsells.
• Waste not, want not. Most marketers (and this applies to the offline world as well as the online world) are incredibly profligate when it comes to wasting the leads and customers they’ve worked so hard to attract. For example, an ad generates 50 leads. 5 buy now and the other 45 are forgotten about. Successful marketers look for areas of waste and under-utilisation, then work out a system to eliminate or reduce that waste (though lead nurturing programs, recycling leads etc.)
• The best time to sell is when a customer has just bought. Whether it be through Butterfly Marketing or another system, many of the presenters use systems to upsell (“would you like to upgrade your package from Bronze to Gold?”) cross-sell (“would you like a video card to go with that monitor?”) and bump (“instead of one widget for $30, would you like 2 widgets for $50?”) from thankyou pages and optin pages. In fact, just like a property developer, wherever there’s vacant real estate on the page, they fill it!

There’s really nothing new here, but I find it extremely instructive to look behind the scenes at the actual figures being generated to provide “proof of concept”.
It’s also vital to remember the difference between those who DO the basics and get the RESULTS versus those who “know” all this but don’t DO and don’t have the RESULTS to show for it.

I’ve revisited these principles in some of my current projects – for example, I get a lot of enquiries for web development and other services that I don’t have the capacity to service. Until recently I was saying, “sorry, can’t help you”. Now I’m referring these enquiries to a network of partners in exchange for a referral fee.

It’s too early to see the results but I estimate this strategy will produce an additional one to two thousand dollars in income per month for around 1 to 2 hours work. This process also adds value to clients because I ensure they get a quality service from web developers who understand how to make websites sell, not just look pretty.

OK – better get back to it.

Will

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Report from World Internet Summit Melbourne

I’m writing this from the floor of the World Internet Summit in Melbourne. The organiser Brett McFall as well as some of the other speakers have made updates to the World Internet Summit blog, and I note that the sales page has already shifted to promote the next stop on the tour, the World Internet Summit Singapore.

Right now I’m witnessing a fascinating process.  Mike Filsaime of Buterfly Marketing fame has recently launched a new free report called The Resource Report.    It’s a comprehensive dossier of all the tools and resources he uses to run his multi-million dollar Internet business.  Without any fanfare and no official “launch” process, he has asked people at the seminar to tell their friends about the report, then let the viral process do its work.

Around 24 hours later, the process had already generated 7,800 opt-in subscribers and roughly $7,800 in sales.  Not bad!

Mike also drew a raffle and gifted the revenue generated so far to one of the delegates, Nicole.  Nice one!

By the end of the event, Mike hopes to generate 20,000+ opt-ins.

Join the process – download “The Resource Report” FREE.

I’ll write again about the final results and try to draw out some of the key distinctions of why it was / wasn’t successful.

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I’m off to the World Internet Summit in Melbourne March 8-11

Next week I’m looking forward to attending the World Internet Summit in Melbourne, a 4-day seminar featuring some of the biggest names in Internet marketing including Stephen Pierce, Mike Filsaime, Tom Hua, Brett McFall, Ewan Chia et al – as well as a number of up-and-coming stars in the field.

The seminar looks like it’s focused mainly at the make-money-in-your-dressing-gown style of Internet marketing (hey, I don’t care what I’m wearing!), which is slightly different from my own focus which is sales lead generation and online sales process optimisation for product and service businesses.

However, many of the strategies and techniques that have been developed by e-book marketers and affiliate marketers are directly applicable to product and service marketing, so I’m hoping to pick up a few choice tips that I can apply to my consulting clients’ websites.

I almost wasn’t going to attend this seminar, but a couple of things changed my mind…

• They have a two-for-one ticket offer, allowing me to split the cost with fellow Brisbanite and Internet Marketer Yaro.
• I probably already know 95% percent of the content, but if I don’t attend events like this, how will I learn about the other 5%?
• I’m looking forward to networking opportunities with attendees and speakers.

Especially if you’re already based in Melbourne and you have an Internet component to your business, I recommend checking out this seminar. Some people may find the ideas discussed very “small business”, but with a little creativity they can usually be adapted to suit more traditional online businesses.

If you’re planning to go and you’d like to catch up for a chat, drop me a line via this page.

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