Declined Transaction Information

[Confuscius]

Just after some views from other Affiliates and some information from DigiWin.

Based on my last 3 months sales then I am facing a declined rate of about 10%, so for every £1,000 that starts as Pending then about £900 ends up as Confirmed.

Now with all the attempted fraud going on you might think this figure not too bad BUT when I look at the detail I am left somewhat puzzled - not high value electronics products, not 5 minute transactions but a lot of what look like fairly normal transactions to me.

Just one example, Clicked at 2008-01-12 14:23:33, Purchased 3 days later at 2008-01-15 20:53:15 and Declined 2 days later at 2008-01-17 15:33:43 - and the click ref is for a Silicone Swim Cap at about £20 , hardly what I would see as a fraudster's 'Hot Pick'!

So they may have been out of stock, no longer available or 20 other reasons but, personally, I would like to know why. Then let's say you see lots of declines from one source (which I do!) it might make you somewhat suspicious (as I am!) and therefore the provision of information would serve more than one useful purpose.

So, the basic question is two fold: Are merchants required to say why they decline a transaction and, if they are, why is this info not made readily available to us either in the Admin centre or via email?

Considered views and your experiences, please, or vent your spleen if you want to!

Paul

[Amoochi]

Ironically I was going to post about this very subject at some point today due to a declined sale for me again today.

I've only had 3 declined so far, two which were pretty straight forward from Empire Stores a while back (almost certainly returned items or declined credit due to the nature of that company) and my third which came today from Cloggs which has me completely baffled and which I am going to contact Cloggs about as I want to know why. I don't think my sites are quite earning the same amount as you, so I can't make a direct comparison, but from my sales so far, i'd say i've actually had less than 1% declined, so in that sense it's not bad, but it does make it all the more annoying when it actually happens without any kind of explaination or notice of it happening.

It really does annoy me that we are not openly and up front given any kind of reason as to why a sale has been declined though, in fact we aren't even informed that a sale is declined in any way. The only ways to spot declined sales appears to be either spot the pending total amount take a drop or to actually look at the stats page and see a little red dot.

We work hard to get sales, I think it would be common courtesy to at least be told why and when a sale doesn't result in a commission due to being declined.

I seriously think this is something that needs addressing.

[Bud]

Can only agree that a little clarity would make me feel a lot more comfortable about the numerous declines.

Also, it seems to me that a certain few big names have found that they can decline pretty much a fixed rate of transactions and not encounter any negative reaction. Obviously this makes a certain amount of business sense but I'm not sure it's in the spirit of things (or ethical?).

Let's face it, for probably 95%+ of the transactions we have no knowledge of what happened past the first click. What happens when you query a transaction decline (possibly something you bought yourself)? "Oh, don't know what happened - we'll credit your account". It seems to me that this is one of those - "Oh s*** - caught out" moments.

I firmly believe this is not AW's (or other networks for that matter) fault as I believe it is also in their interests to claim all valid sales as well, but the point here is how thoroughly are the declines investigated?

Finally, while I'm at it, a little niggle I do have with AW's reporting system is on the main page we use, in 'My Account', the daily figures are given for 'New Pending' and 'New Confirmed' along with 'Current Balance (Pending and Confirmed)'. Why not a 'New Declined' and 'Current Declined'? That looks too much like trying to keep these things quiet...

Also, click on 'New Confirmed' on the page defaults to 'Pending' and 'Confirmed' amounts - where is the 'Declined' column? Sure it is there but not as default, this has to be selected. Again, not making it obvious.

[Bud]

I also made a post in A4U about Empire Stores appaling conversion rate:

Summarised as: 80% of sales declined -resulting in 94% of 'earnings' declined.

Frankly, I don't believe a word of it!

Now blocked

[Bud]

OK, while I'm here ...

Two major high street stores selling more or less identical products:

Official AW stats

Store 1. 96% approval
Store 2. 69% approval

Now this suggests that store 2 is being over zealous in it's declining of sales as I cannot imagine the customer base is any different. Or, Store 1 is being lax. That 27% difference is a large amount!

I was going to mention Store 3 with what I would expect to be a similar customer base but this has a slightly different product range. This has a very poor 57% approval. Month in - Month out. Is there really that much consistent fraud, returns, cancelled orders (mostly)?

I appreciate that this may not be the best place to put these comments as they are covered in better depth in A4U, but I feel better now! :p

[authcode]

I agree that declined commissions could be made more visible by adding a total for the day to the summary box like the pending and approved commissions. Watching for drops in the pending total is pretty inconvenient.

As for reasons for declined transactions if you hover over the red dot next to a declined transaction you will get a (very brief) reason like 'declined', 'cancelled' etc. It's not an obvious method of communicating information and it's by no means in depth but it might satisfy your curiosity. Just thought I'd point that out because no one's mentioned it.

[Andy]

we get quite a few declined or simply never showing up (how do I know? it's my business to know!!)
The red dot method doesn't always work btw, many a time it's been blank.

the most annoying ones are transactions that you KNOW have gone through because it's either been taken off your credit card and delivered to your house where it's sat snuggly in it's place, or it's all gone the same way for a parent/friend/neighbour.

AffWin doesn't have much of a missing transaction reporting system. Our friends at TradeDoubler have a wonderful system where we download a spreadsheet, fill it in and send it to them, resulting in us getting 100% of our contested transactions paid within 3 weeks of submitting.

Back to AffWin retailers, looking at the affwindex i see that there are some retailers which are either having serious problems with fraudsters (in which case Aff Win should be helping out) or they are run by similar.

See for yourself. go to http://www.affiliatewindow.com/affiliates/general_merchant_report.php
show 500 records per page
select all sectors
generate report.

Then, click the "approval %" link to sort them in ascending order.

forget all the n/a's, but check out the approval rate on yell.com !!

Not a shopwindow retailer though.

You'll notice that the worst approvals are all lead based retailers (loans, insurance etc). considering that most people shop around for these, yet they stick transactions in like they're logging clicks, it's not suprising.

Its not until you reach Countrybookshop that shopwindow retailers appear. Countrybookshop incidentily has an approval rate of a meagre 45.35%
if over half of your sales are fraudulent or at least out of stock, then you've got a serious problem with your website, your business or the running of the affiliate program.
It takes them 12 days to reverse validate. OK, I place an order, they send it to the warehouse on day 2, day 3 its packed, day 4 it's posted. maximum, day 7-10 I return it.

so 12 days to reverse transactions is way more than is needed for "out of stock" "credit card refused" etc.

I'm not having a go at Countrybookshop per say, they just happen to be the lowest approving retailer in the shopwindow system. It's unfortunate for them that they are the lowest approving retailer, I was all reared up to have a go at someone else tbh, but hey ho, that's the way it goes....

Putting myself in the shoes of a network, if over half the sales I brokered for a retailer were then reversed out, I would be asking alot of questions.

[Confuscius]

45.35% - hmm! Exactly the same chance of eliciting a response from the network! J/K!

The one that gets me is the 'not the last referrer' one - how does that work given that the click and transaction come from MY cookie?

Perhaps we could all combine to create a comprehensive list of reasons used (without naming the Merchants!) - might be quite comical!

Paul