Affiliate rant

[stender]

Am I not doing something right? I have a site using various affiliates and am forever having to update it due to pages moving etc.. I probably don't keep an eye on my sites as much as I should but it's a royal pain in the 'arris.

I checked one site today and found mothercare had moved from buy.at and my link just went to buy at's homepage. Right lot of use! had the same problem when buy at wouldn't update their kiddicare feed very often leading to broken links. And when they did change feeds you had no way of knowing other than checking their feeds page. Is it that hard for affiliates to send out a notice saying feeds had been updated? they do after all find it easy to spam us with unwanted info.

Is their any easy way of monitoring affiliate links or is it a manual operation?

</rant>

 

[mat]

When they shutdown a program they normaly email you. They should do anyway!

I find most of it in the junk folder!

 

[kendalcottages]

Whether you get the email will also depend on whether you're signed up to receive them.

Travelodge did a classic one recently. Rather than close their program, they announced that they were changing their commission rate to 0%. (Well, I say 'announced' but I happened to notice it on the A4U forum, and never got an email...)

 

[vizzo]

I find it annoying that:

So many merchants change from one affiliate programme to another, and then change again
Often they don't tell you
When they do tell you, you have to go trawling through your sites to find the appropriate links to remove.

 

[kendalcottages]

Yes, it's a pain... but I've come to accept that it just kind of comes with the territory.