Jangro.com Social Media, Affiliate Marketing, etc. Heavy on the etc.

In an article by Brian Livingston, long time writer on the ongoing adware in affiliate marketing saga, both Commission Junction and ShopatHomeSelect (Belcaro) comment on the recent removal of ShopAtHomeSelect from the CJ network.

CJ’s Terance Kinsky says in the matter-of-fact manner of someone who sees this stuff every day of his life:

Belcaro is one of those cases where we found some issues, and they corrected some…But they couldn’t demonstrate that they could control the situation, either with technology or with policies on their end.

And Belcaro Group’s comment:

We work with many suppliers, including the Commission Junction network. As with any of our supplier partners, misunderstandings and miscommunications can occur. We are concerned about how this will impact our Commission Junction Merchant Partners’ fourth quarter goals, and regret any impact on these valued partners. We look forward to resolving any misunderstandings between us and the Commission Junction network.

It’s interesting to see the two sides of the story together. Misunderstanding? From my own past experiences, I’m quite confident that this was not a sudden move by Commission Junction, but more likely something that has been ongoing for several weeks, perhaps even months.

“Concern for the welfare of their valued partners…”

In this thread on ABestWeb a Commission Junction merchant, BuyCostumes, asks a question about a strange redirect. They have a customer who typed in their domain into their browser, www.buycostumes.com, and they ended up on etoys.com. The ABW members replied with the theory that perhaps this is a ShopatHomeSelect user and they were taken to eToye, a SaHS partner on Linkshare instead of allowing the user to go where they wished.
Seems preposterous to me. So I installed ShopatHomeSelect’s Golden Retriever software to check it out.

I’ve had more than my fill of shopping plugin and spyware testing, and I prefer to leave adware hunting to others. But the timing of my tests turned into an interesting turn of events. Here’s how it went…

1. Installed SaHS ’s Golden Retriever ActiveX plug-in for Internet Explorer
2. Fought through the flashbacks of prior days testing spyware and shopping plugins
3. Restarted Internet Explorer
4. Typed www.buycostumes.com into the browser
5. I then saw shopathomeselect.com cycle through as a redirect, then directly to etoys.com

It was true. I was redirected to etoys.com. Misunderstanding and miscommunication? or a last ditch effort to capture some valuable halloween sales? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

So I went on to test a number of different CJ advertisers and did not receive the same redirect.

And then it got more interesting. About 5 minutes in, I got an error message from ShopAtHomeSelect:

Then 15 minutes later, another message, “ShopAtHomeSelect is again available for Cash Back rebates…”

No more redirects away from BuyCostumes.com.

Now, maybe after all this was the unintended effect of the mass-removal of hundreds of Commission Junction Advertisers from the SaHS rebates plug-in and they just fixed it. If so, not only can they not control the behavior of thier distribution channel, but there’s an issue to controlling their software’s behavior as well.

Regardless of whether the Networks allow or disallow certain publishers to operate within their juristiction, be careful who you partner with. Mistake or not, I wonder how much of BuyCostume’s business eToys received in the past few days.