Affiliate Future a joke..

[julian]

Anyone else experiencd problems with this crock of shite?

their merchant application constantly fails, login is broken, tracking is dogey to say the least.

someone told me recently they goign down the pan someone else said they been bought out - either way not impressed, especially form merchant perspective..

 

[itrends]

Yup, bunch of rubbish. Jump ship to direct affiliate schemes with companies or perhaps buy.at/

 

[julian]

tbh, buy .at where load of shite too, their api is trash so badly designed, payouts are shite also.

Yup, bunch of rubbish. Jump ship to direct affiliate schemes with companies or perhaps buy.at/

 

[ScottJ]

For the most part I have used Affiliate Window for feeds.

 

[storebuilder]

We used them to implement the affiliate program for propertymentor.co.uk and it was useless. Stay well clear.

 

[bdnvip]

i think tradedoubler is the best apart from the 2month lag between invoicing merchants and payout its the best i have used so far

 

[devolution]

Yep -- I had big trouble with their mobile phone programmes, often their links would be 'looping' for days...

 

[Cryxellis]

Good thing I haven't seen that site yet, and I owe you for telling us
that info. Thanks

 

[satch]

I only used affiliatefuture for a long time , before I learnt about other affiliate services.

Although ive never had big problems with affiliatefuture Ive got better results from other programs.

 

[PredPred is verified member.]

just to confirm they are a pile of crap, yes
never earned 1 penny from them, also their affiliate firms seem to go down pan on a daily basis. seems like they are ripping everyone off, in time if nothing else

 

[Americar]

I concur with all of the above .. i have used any number of affiliate providers over time and the stand out is Zanox.com They are multi-national so you can select which Countries you wish to use .. they pay on time and stats are good .. support leaves something to be desired but you cant have everything i guess ...

Bad revenue results are not always down to the affiliate provider the advertiser more than likely fails to report transactions either by design or because the tracking code is a ballz up .. who knows thats a mystery that you have to live with when using affiliate advertisers .. if there is no result remove their banners and sack them they will be the losers in the end ...

 

[3wdl]

Hi all,

Let me firstly introduce myself - I am James Little and I am the head of publishing at AffiliateFuture.

I was promoted to this thread by a member of Affiliates4u and thought it was a good idea to drop a quick post to clear up a few misconceptions that you may have about AffiliateFuture.

Firstly, to answer Julian in regards to “going down the pan”, this is certainly not the case – AffiliateFuture/IBG recently merged with TMN, a public trading company and as a group we now have over 200 members of staff.

Sales through the UK network in the last year have been over £130m and we have around 650 merchants on the UK network, as well as operations in Europe and the US.

Our tracking is extremely solid and after the implementation of Veracitag (which you can read more about at AffiliateFuture blog - updates and comments from the leading UK Affiliate Network Blog Archive AffiliateFuture launches consumer-friendly tracking technology) we have seen a further increase in sales tracked.

It’s disappointing that some of you seem to have had issues with our services in the past – I’d welcome any dialog and would love to help a few of you do more with AffiliateFuture.

Due to the timing of this thread, I should also mention that logins have been disrupted recently due to a 10 day maintenance that is currently taking place; this does not however affect the links / commission and is purely to do with the front end interface/reporting.

There are a lot of good things happening at AffiliateFuture over the next few months including the re-release of our retail product feed system and if anyone would like to discuss the network in more detail then please feel free to get in touch at any time.

My contact details are:

Phone. 020 7927 6579
Mobile: 0759 313 4731
Fax. 020 7927 8108
Email / MSN: [email protected]

AffiliateFuture
40-44 Clipstone Street
London
W1W 5DW

Thanks
James

 

[BFTUK]

I use Affiliate Future amongst numerous other networks, i do agree there are a few flaws to their backend systems, but their new interface is leaps and bounds better than the old interface but takes a little time getting used to if you've used the old system.

I have to say for ease of use Affiliate Window are good, as are Paidonresults.com (not a huge volume of merchants), DGM and Webgains are worth a mention too.

I have to say Buy.at would'nt rank highly on my list of favourite networks in terms of usability but they do have some fantastic brands on board so are hard to ignore.

A plus point for Affiliate Future is their huge range of merchants, literally huge and a merchant for nearly any concievable niche.



James a huge flaw i see with the AF interface is the lack of a decent search function, here are a few suggested improvements from a small affiliate like me.

a) its tucked away, put a link to a search function under the main menu of the merchant section.
b) it needs to offer a better broad match function - Ie. Unless you type in the direct name of the merchant you won't find it, an example being a search for lollipop does not show me the merchant Lollipop Animation
c) How about allowing people to search for anything contained in the merchants description, with so many merchants on offer it can be hard to find the right merchant for a niche. Ie. Let me search of animation and show me merchants like Lollipop Animation.

 

[3wdl]

I use Affiliate Future amongst numerous other networks, i do agree there are a few flaws to their backend systems, but their new interface is leaps and bounds better than the old interface but takes a little time getting used to if you've used the old system.

I have to say for ease of use Affiliate Window are good, as are Paidonresults.com (not a huge volume of merchants), DGM and Webgains are worth a mention too.

I have to say Buy.at would'nt rank highly on my list of favourite networks in terms of usability but they do have some fantastic brands on board so are hard to ignore.

A plus point for Affiliate Future is their huge range of merchants, literally huge and a merchant for nearly any concievable niche.



James a huge flaw i see with the AF interface is the lack of a decent search function, here are a few suggested improvements from a small affiliate like me.

a) its tucked away, put a link to a search function under the main menu of the merchant section.
b) it needs to offer a better broad match function - Ie. Unless you type in the direct name of the merchant you won't find it, an example being a search for lollipop does not show me the merchant Lollipop Animation
c) How about allowing people to search for anything contained in the merchants description, with so many merchants on offer it can be hard to find the right merchant for a niche. Ie. Let me search of animation and show me merchants like Lollipop Animation.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions on search - we've currently got a technical ticket open for this exact issue and it's something that should be solved in the next release, i'll let you know when it's sorted and in the mean time if you want any information on our merchants feel free to give me a shout,

Cheers
James

 

[grantwgrantw is verified member.]

This is not just an AF problem but is there any reason why you don't insist that merchants include certain default fields in their data feeds or stick to a strict structure? I build quite a few sites around affiliate feeds and find myself choosing the merchant to use by the quality of the feed, not the payout/stock quality/reputation etc etc.

As an example, the magazine-group feed does not contain a category field which makes the feed 100% useless unless you just want to churn out the 400 or so products in alphabetical order?? If it had a category column it would have been used on a super-generic domain - as it doesn't, it isn't

Just to rant a bit more here's a sample line:

80100517 The Woodworker "32%. Established over 100 years ago, The Woodworker is the ultimate resource for enthusiasts, from intermediate to professional. It's seen as the authoritative voice of woodworking. Subscribe today and get a FREE issue of "The Woodworker Plans Special" (usually £4.99). It includes a full listing of all our favourite plans, from model boats to grandfather clocks - plus three pull-out A1 working plans of popular furniture designs, and a step-by-step guide to building your own workshop by professional woodworker Alan Holtham. Available from the end of September." "32%. Established over 100 years ago, The Woodworker is the ultimate resource for enthusiasts, from intermediate to professional. It's seen as the authoritative voice of woodworking. Subscribe today and get a FREE issue of "The Woodworker Plans Special" (usually £4.99). It includes a full listing of all our favourite plans, from model boats to grandfather clocks - plus three pull-out A1 working plans of popular furniture designs, and a step-by-step guide to building your own workshop by professional woodworker Alan Holtham. Available from the end of September." The Woodworker Magazine Subscription http://www.magazine-group.co.uk/article_images/articledir_6/3295/1_thumbnail.jpg http://img.afnt.co.uk/80100517_t.jpg 44.2000 29.9900 "" "" 538 1

The 32% (which I think is the discount rate but unsure as there are no column headers!) is included after the opening " of the magazine description, this causes problems sraight away when parsing the file as it shouldn't be there. The prices are set to 4 decimal places, another pain and totally unneccesary and what the final 538 and 1 columns mean is anyones guess. In all, its an unusable mess.

Grant

 

[3wdl]

Thanks for the feedback Grant,

To be perfectly honest - our feed system for retail is not fantastic at the moment; this is something that is being addresses and we are in the process of re-developing the entire retail feed system with a target date of late August to get this live.

The new system will replicate the strong work we have done with our travel feeds & the XML webservices, have a lot better validation and mapping and also bring is up-to-date with the industry by launching content units, etc.

Apologies for the delay in this - we want to make sure that when we re-release our feeds they are the best they could possibly be rather than have a half-arsed attempt at it!

I'll keep you update, you're also more than welcome to attend our retail event to be held on 16th September in London - we will be showcasing our new technology here and if you'd like an invite please drop me an email and i'll get you on the guest list (same goes for anyone from here).

Cheers
James