Starting OWN Affiliate Program

[Disciple67]

Thinking about starting an affiliate program for a downloadable product. What kinds of Fraud 101 kind of stuff do I need to know?

I'm really intrigued by fraud since in a year of fiddling with affiliate programs as a newbie affiliate myself I have seen quite a number of merchants close or switch theirs due to fraud...and I'm talking about some pretty big names, too! I mean big-name affiliate networks or self-hosted affiliate software, you know, CJ, iDevAffiliate, that kind of thing....

Seems like there's NO way to prevent fraud???

Me, I have a WordPress plugin, Affiliate Royale (and thinking of picking up another, WP Affiliate Platform)...all advice appreciated!!

 

[scottfanello]

It seems if you're worried about fraud you're best bet would be to go through one of the big names like CJ or Clickbank. They make money through successful transfers from vendor to affiliate. Fraud would kill that. They have more at stake preventing fraud then individual vendors do.

I'm not a vendor but I'm both an affiliate promoter and a buyer from Clickbank and I've never had any problems.

I'll be interested to hear who else posts on this one.

 

[Disciple67]

Well, that's just it: I've even had merchants drop out of CJ, ShareASale -- even stop using iDevAffiliate -- due to fraud!!

But I don't have money to spend like that, so I must run my own simple programs with low-cost WordPress plugins. But I need to know what all these tricks are so that I can prevent them for myself! I'm really flabbergasted that mature as affiliate marketing online is there seems to be no way to totally prevent fraud...again, I'm talking about totally legit merchants claiming that they were defrauded on totally legit networks or through their own totally legit software!!!