Linkshare commission error!

[Riceball]

Hello everyone,
I am an affiliate manager as a merchant. My company has joined Linkshare above 1 month, and from recent statistics, we found these figures is totally different from Linkshare to us.
Like this month, we received 309 orders brought by Linkshare in our system, 214 are first time customer, 95 are returned customer. While on Linkshare flat, only 179 order was tracked successfully.
Apparantly this figure makes a big problem. Some publishers cannot get what they did.
I wanna know does that mean Linkshare only calculate the commission on the first time purchaser?
Also, ShareASale tracking method almost runs the same way as Linkshare, is it the same with the commission calculation?
Thanks!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Riceball,

Fist of all I applaud you for being concerned about your affiliates not being credited for some of their sales and wanting to look into it. That's a lot of missing sales and very concerning.

Hard for me to know for sure, but I have a pretty good idea about what could have happened.

Have you submitted a support ticket to Linkshare about this?

Affiliate tracking is never 100%, unfortunately. In general (not specific to Linkshare) some things that can happen are that consumers delete their cookies, anti spyware apps delete or block cookies and even some applications totally block affiliate links. Those are a few reasons why a certain percentage of sales do not track.

However Linkshare claims to have cookieless tracking and 'says' their tracking is more accurate. Not so sure about that, but here's what their site says.

<a href="http://www.linkshare.com/affiliates/affiliates.shtml">Our patented tracking technology is not cookie-based and therefore, does not fall prey to the tracking discrepancies that often result from cookies. LinkShare's robust technology ensures that tracking is accurate and complete.</a>

So it's very concerning that you have such a large % of sales that isn't tracking.

So do follow up with Linkshare support and then let us know what you find out.