I assume Snowcovered needs to deliver more money to DNN Corp to cover all Directors salary.

Hi guys... I just wanted to most my feedback here.  I really don't think that this is about DNN or Snowcovered trying to make a few extra bucks (trust me, their payouts with this method will be higher... the entire point of an affiliate program is that it must be successful or it doesn't work). I think DNN and Snowcovered are really trying to 'loosen it up' to encourage more affiliates.

The bigger problem here was that most people didn't know how the older system worked and that's because it changed over time. I imagine if you have been part of the affiliate program over the last few years you would have noticed around the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 that your referral sales went down from previous years. Some of this was because of the abuse of a few that were putting the referral links directly in the snowcovered listing pages etc... So... The real 'lock down' happened before the acquisition and in years past (back when the affiliate/referral program was paying higher pay outs) it was working the same way that the new system is working now (except that the new system allows for multiple referral codes, more detailed reports, etc..). I believe (and my understanding from asking Brice at last years conference) was that after a year the referral was lost from the vendor and that customer was then owned by Snowcovered directly. So basically even if you brought a customer to the site after a year nobody would have the possibility to see referral sales from that customer.

I know that I personally reached out to Rhonda / Snowcovered after the acquisition and brought to their attention that this really wasn't in the favor of developers and affiliates, and which in turn really wasn't great for Snowcovered because this means more and more developers would sale the products on their own sites directly or not see that advertising and promoting Snowcovered was worth while.


With the new system if a customer went to our site and purchased a module, we would receive a commission... If a day or two later they went and purchased something from another vendors website/link then that vendor would could credit... This is much better then having a customer locked down to a specific affiliate for a year and then lost forever.... Additionally you can see the referral and where it came from instead of always wondering...

I guess my question for the community would be... How did you previously think it worked? Did you know that if a client went from your site and purchased that you were not getting the referral unless they previously were your referral? Did you know that after a year that customer was not paying out any referrals anymore?

I believe this is further confirmed if you check out the reporting feature that was just introduced today... At least for our statistics our referrals are up about 40% for the month and we can use multiple codes (some for newsletters, others for the site) to help see where marketing is helping and where its not helping (something the old system never had).

Also, just a note to help other affiliates... If you are concerned or interested in updating your affiliate code on your web site I created a quick blog post to show you how you can update your referral codes. I was able to update our web site within a few minutes...

http://www.datasprings.com/News/Blog/tabid/980/PostID/15/Simple-Replace-Statement-w/-SQL-Server-Query-.aspx

I would be interested in hearing any other comments, I was actually just very surprised to see so much negative feedback because this seemed like such an obvious win/win for affiliates and Snowcovered (in the end once more affiliates sign up).

-Chad