Product Feed Misuse - Part 2
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Following on from an earlier blog post about Newitts decision to pull their product feed from affiliate use, Matt Ross, the affiliate manager, was kind enough to answer questions regarding the matter:
1. If you know there’s misuse - why not just stop those affiliates misusing, instead of everyone?
Because we had no reply from the affiliate network. The affiliate was listing our products on Froogle. The merchant name also changed a few times on Froogle, so they must’ve known what they were doing. We contacted Google straight away, and they were very helpful. Ultimately the decision to pull the plug on our feeds came from the top. One of the arguments was that some of our suppliers can be quite fussy about where their products are ultimately listed. We have built good relationships with our suppliers over the years and have exclusive selling rights on some products. In all fairness, the network have now responded and have identified the affiliate in question.
2. What exactly do you define as misuse?
Listing our products on Froogle. We like Google, and Google likes us. Let’s keep it that way.
3. Would you consider “closed groups” for product feeds?
Possibly
4. Awin have just introduced shop.window.. will your feeds be lost from there too?
Yes, for now. We might be doing something with Hotpicks.
5. Is product feed misuse effecting other merchants?
The first time I heard about misuse from other merchants was on this blog.
I’d like to thank Matt for taking the time to answer my questions. It’s a shame that once again a minority are damaging how affiliates and merchants are working together, and also that the network involved didn’t act sooner so that Newitts weren’t forced into taking this decision.
Let’s hope it is resolved, and that a feed is made available once again to affiliates who are genuine and professional in their approach to merchant promotion.
3 Comments on this post
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Clarke said:
It’s a shame it comes to removing the feed from all for what is basically one Affiliate if I am reading this correctly.
I have to say however that I was not aware of this type of misuse myself and you know me, I like to keep up with all kinds of tricks and underhand stuff to keep it at bay.
My prediction is that you will see a major shift this year towards, not wanting to play ball, we will have to remove the ball from you approaches but I would ideally like to see that done on a individual basis and not a everyone basis. Doing it to everyone just telling the world you have lost control of your program or have other motives behind removing the service.
April 2nd, 2007 at 7:20 pm -
Dan said:
I’ve seen this Froogle spamming happening more and more often recently. It’s this kind of trickery that reflects badly on the affiliate marketing industry and leads to all legitimate affiliates getting tarred with the same (grubby) brush - as in the case of the withdrawal of the Newitts datafeed.
Let’s hope the networks are doing something to clamp down on it.
April 12th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
[...] opinion as it breaches Google’s T&C’s and it was this kind of spamming that prompted Newitts to remove their product feed. Networks usually clamp down on reported affiliates for this and ask them to remove their [...]