1ShoppingCart (MarketersChoice.com) Affiliate Program Not Working

* 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 Marketers Choice (an OEM version of 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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