I would think this would be a problem to affiliates if they replaced the cookie every time someone abandons regardless of any effort from their service, but I have spoken to someone at their company before for my own web store(which has a high abandon rate) and they ONLY get credit for a sale, if someone abandons, they identify them, they receive an email, AND click on that email to go back to the merchant's site. That seems like a pretty fair practice to me. They are earning their commission not stealing it like incentive programs or desktop.
I, as a merchant, just think affiliates don't understand the model.
My two cents.
Jeff
Jeff, I think Scott touch on the fact if a merchant has 45 days cookies, second byte turns that into 1 day for affiliates. If visitors don't purchase the product the question is why the merchant did not close the deal? especially if they went as far as putting an item in the shopping cart. You say that Second Byte is earning their commission - Didn't the affiliate earn their commission as well by driving the traffic to the merchant?
"I, as a merchant, just think affiliates don’t understand the model."
Do you see this comment I just posted? I had to hit Submit Comment. Do you see the box highlighted in pink. Aggressive Techniques? To me that is a serious issue and I doubt many merchants have it in their privacy policy that information they never submit is being farmed out to a third party so they can be contacted later with commericial email. As a shopper, this would disturb me. And I would remember this by never shopping with the merchant again.
Jeff, I can only speak for myself but I understand the model completely.
It's a problem to affiliates if they replace the cookie 1, 10 or 100% of the time.
If I send you 1000 visitors and 50 of them abandon their shopping cart (for whatever reason -- doesn't mean they're not going to buy later), is it right that you hand them over to another affiliate automatically?
How can you expect affiliates to feel good about a program that is going to lose some percentage of transactions?
I think Dickie Boy's response is indicative of what affiliates will do, with or without any corroborating evidence to the contrary that Second Bite doesn't lose the affiliate's ID, they'll abandon the merchant.
Second Bite must proactively prove and then aggreesively assert that they don't remove the affiliate's ID or else a really good tool for the merchant could fail before getting out of the gate.
Sure, its a problem for affiliates -- but its a bigger problem for the merchants. May be I am living behind some curtain here, but I am watching my numbers on a daily basis.
If conversions for a certain merchant/offer suddenly drop 25% and my profit margins evaporate, guess what, tommorow that merchant isn't going to see any more traffic from me. Chances are I'm not going to be the only one that does this.
Merchants are the ones screwing themselves when they do things that kill conversion rates. Its the merchants that have large overhead expenses and employees. Sure, I'd like that extra $300 a day, but if it dissappears I can just shurg it off and start a new project. I don't know about you guys, but I've never lost any sleep over this stuff.
Scott,
Interesting technology and I see your concern from the Affiliate perspective. However, any Merchant worth their salt can/should be doing this with their existing ecommerce platform or email service provider (ESP). I know the likes of CheetahMail enable their Clients to do this type of targeted re-marketing today. Frankly, any retailer of substance will have an existing relationship with an ESP. Any retailer would have to be asleep at the wheel to let Second Bite come inand pay them to do something they are already paying their ESP. The Second Bite is really out of the retailer's pocket.
One last thing, the good news is that many retailers don't over-write last referred when coming from email so the referring Affiliate will most likely still get credit for the sale.
© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
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Second Bite Solutions is an online service provider that has an effective, patent-pending, technology that assists merchants in addressing the shopping cart abandonment problem. But is it at the expense of their traditional affiliates?
According to their website, The merchant installs Second Bite's technology into their shopping cart process where they capture the user information at the earliest possible point in order to keep a lifeline on the visitor in the case of shopping cart abandonment. Second Bite later sends one or more emails to the end user inviting and enticing them back to make the purchase.