Would you join an affiliate program that....

[phppete]

... only accepted orders from the UK (assuming you lived in the UK).

Due to fraud we currently only accept UK orders, so when I launch the affiliate program I am thinking that maybe some people will be put off from joining due to this. They may think its too restrictive and will result in poor revenue.

On the other hand though, at least affiliates will be assured that chargebacks due to fraud will be low.

The site is selling jewellery, so given the mass appeal would that put you off?

Just wanting to guage the opinion of other sensible web masters, and this forum seems to have nice intelligent site owners :)

Also, if you registered on a shopping site and bought a product, lets say a gift for someone, would you be interested in entering your friends and families birthdays in a Calendar to receive automated emails at a pre-chosen time before the day to remind you to buy a gift and that it is your friends birthday? Do online gadgets like this attract to the 'stickiness' of a site or just confuse and hinder?

Pete

[Joe]

Originally posted by phppete:
Also, if you registered on a shopping site and bought a product, lets say a gift for someone, would you be interested in entering your friends and families birthdays in a Calendar to receive automated emails at a pre-chosen time before the day to remind you to buy a gift and that it is your friends birthday? Do online gadgets like this attract to the 'stickiness' of a site or just confuse and hinder?

Pete,

For myself, I tend to shy away from any site that asks for too much personal information and I would include in that information such as birthdays etc. There are so many calendars etc., that come almost standard with the operating system of PCs, that I would rather rely on one of those than have another email cluttering up my inbox.

Just one opinion. I'm sure you'll get lots more.

Joe

[Rich]

Due to fraud we currently only accept UK orders,
This question is a little off-topic, but I assume you are interested in increasing sales revenue if you are contemplating adding an affiliate program... Is the UK-only orders a requirement from your merchant bank? As you probably know the products you sell are *very* high risk for fraud.

However, fraud is not reduced by limiting orders to your *own* country, but rather by limiting orders from *high-risk* countries. You might find that opening orders to a few select countries goes much further to increasing sales compared to an affiliate program.

Also, because of your products, you will need to be on the outlook for affiliate fraud. I would recommend that as you setup your affiliate program that you restrict payouts to at least 90 days after product delivery to minimize any potential fraud from affiliate sales.

[phppete]

Joe,

Thanks for your input, I never really thought about the privacy issue, but users who would be able to use this feature would have signed up anyway and registered. Certainly food for thought, thanks :)

Rich,

We have our own merchant account through our bank and use secpay.com to interface with that, therefore we can take whatever orders we like from anywhere. The problem we have is insuring packages abroad, here in the UK we use Special Delivery for the more expensive items which guarantees next day delivery and insures up to £2000. When sending to the US, we don't have many options as jewellery is not covered and despite Royal Mail claiming to track International Special Delivery orders the service is useless for anything other than the UK.

Secpay do a great job of filtering the fraudulent orders and also informs us whether we have an address and security code match or just one match. So that is the reasoning behind the UK only orders. As a fairly new business we can't really entertain many loses. A friend of mine who owns an amazingly successful gadgets and gizmos site lost over £5000 in one week from fraud from customers in the US.

As for the Affiliate Program I am developing, I am aware of the problems there, we have already had people abusing our free gift offer with orders over £40, they get the product and the free gift then return the product for a refund and keep the free gift!... I was going to put a 60 day restriction but I may go with 90 days or find some filtering system for potential 'ify' orders.

Despite the high risk of jewellery we only sell silver at the moment and items are priced around the £20 to £100 range so that is less appealing to the fraudsters. At least with accepting orders only in the UK, fraudsters are reachable with a baseball bat....lol :)

Pete