If I’m correct, they may have meant “We cannot track commissions automatically” rather than “We cannot track commissions at all”. Each week since the latest landing page was built, I’ve received a large batch of commissions with none of my usual user data appended.

Hopefully I’m right so you won’t lose money and there isn’t yet another huge problem in our industry.

It seems odd that they say this is “required” though, this certainly helps in the case of “cookie rejecters” and those that clear them regularly but it isn’t required to track the normal cookie enable users that make up the majority.

The company I work for has always ended out paying both parties if there is some confusion over who owns the referral. I guess not everyone is so generous

This will be a document outlining to merchants the things they should be revealing to affiliates, in order to allow affiliates a better understanding of the state of the playing field before signing up to a campaign. It will cover things such as what channels affiliate sales are deduplicated against, what products are paid out on and what types of affiliates you can expect to be competing against.

Hopefully this will increase merchant understanding and maybe lead to reductions in situations like this one.

It’s easy sorted if all parties want to play fair, if they don’t they need to tell the Affiliates up front that they either don’t want to sort the situation or they can’t technically manage it etc but as long as you know the score then your free to make your own mind up.

@Helen – I don’t think it’s ever been disclosed that they work like this. In fact how they work is a bit of a mystery all round. From what I’m told 30-40% don’t register straightaway but I’d guess it was higher as it’s a gaming merchant (people like to at least see the main site before registering imo).