Affiliate Marketing Blog by AMWSO

Affiliate program Tips, support, bonuses and news from merchant affiliate programs managed by the AMWSO Affiliate marketing team.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Parasite Affiliates Back to the Fore

Well it seems like quite a while since anything exciting happened in the world of parasitic affiliate marketing, but this week we seem to have seen things bubble back up again.

Firstly Ben Edelman released his cool new report entitled Debunking ShopAtHomeSelect which is focused on the violation of affiliate marketing network rules by ShopAtHomeSelect and their GoldenRetriever / SelectRebates software. The name change happened very quietly a few weeks ago, and no doubt had nothing at all to do with all the great information one can find about it on google .

Meanwhile a few new parasites surface, with a lot of focus being place on one particulary nasty one calling themselves a range of things : Rebate Retriever / Vertical Theories / Personal Money Tree and Meridian Business Ventures, according to reports they aren't declaring the use of software in their CJ account (violation I believe) and are certainly targeting merchant brand names directly from the software without user interaction... lots of value added sales there!

And to top off an exciting month (start off actually) we had the nice people at CoolWebSearch installing spyware on consumers PCs to steal personal information of all kinds, great work finding and reporting this by the guys at Sunbelt Software, you can read more about this here.
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Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Coupon Formats and other tools

Well last week we finally launched our Coupond Data Feed System for affiliates and merchants, feed back so far has been good, and we've had a number of very good ideas sent to us on what new features we need, as one person pointed out, with some very minimal tweaking the XML export would be become and excellent coupon RSS. So anyway with it now live it's a matter of growing it slowly and making sure everything runs in perfect order.

The ultimatele aim is to provide affiliates with coupons in a standard format, all coupons from all merchants in a format that they can easily manipulate without having to do any manual editing of the data. So far so good, presently we're supporting exports to CSV, Tab, Pipe and XML.

On the point of data cleaning, our Product Data Cleaner hit version 2.8 this week, many thanks to Mike and Maurice for their feedback and extreme testing, we're looking to do a few more little changes and then launch the next version as 3.0

Both tools are 100% free for merchants and affiliates.
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