New affiliates are able to bypass referring affiliate
| Project: | Ubercart Affiliate v2 |
| Version: | 6.x-2.0-rc5 |
| Component: | Code |
| Category: | bug report |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | closed |
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I'm not sure if this is on purpose but here's what I've learned.
Affiliate A refers someone to their affiliate link. New person signs up and now becomes affiliate B. Now, even though B is assigned to A, affiliate B can go to another computer or clear their cookies and then copy and paste their own affiliate code into the browser (many affiliates want to become affiliates just to get discounts off their own purchases). This now tags the new anonymous user to affiliate B. In reality, the anonymous user is affiliate B who hasn't signed in. Now B can make a purchase(without ever signing in) and when entering in their email, simply enter in their own email or any other email. Now they've just bypassed giving any direct credit or commission to affiliate A and gave it to themselves (not a good deal for affiliate A).
I realize this may be tough or impossible to avoid if they use a different email. But it's seems if they use the registered email(that's linked to affiliate A ) then the system should catch this and assign the credit to affiliate A. Does this mean regardless of who's assigned to who, the system looks at cookies only? This is what it seems like it's doing. Or does it match user id? Either way, just wondering if a criteria could be added to check the email that's linked to the affiliate or user id?
#1
Affiliate B is in the downline of Affiliate A, so Mr. A will get his share (second level commission) no matter what.
#2
You're right that affiliate A will get a share if the levels are set correctly. But even then affiliate A will get less of a share if the commission decreases per levels. If level 1 is 20% and level 2 is 10% affiliate A will only get 10% because affiliate B bought from himself and made the 20%. Worse, someone is always left out. In a two-tiered payout, what about the person who referred affiliate A? They get nothing when in fact they should get a 2nd level payout from affiliate B's purchase. What if it's a only a one tiered affiliate program? Wouldn't A be completely left out?
I appreciate your consistent promptness to these issues.
#3
Well, the number of tiers is entirely your choice.
A will always get less than B because he's on the second level, and that's how the system is designed, nothing wrong about that.
If you want to include the person who signed up person A, have three levels.
If the affiliate program has only one tier, then only one affiliate gets the commission, you guessed right.
The only issue here seems to be that an affiliate can buy a product himself and get the commission, but in some use cases I've encountered here it's even preferred...
#4
Ok, I understand all this and I will try not to keep beating a dead horse so I will ask you how to solve the following scenario.
You sign up on my site to become an affiliate within my 1 tiered system. Then you spend your time and money for marketing in order to drive traffic to my site with your affiliate link. Your traffic comes to my site and they sign up. So far so good. But then you learn from one of your friends that they were also able to sign up to be an affiliate, except they were smart. They now buy from themselves because they clear cookies and use their own affiliate link to come to my site as an anonymous shopper.
I think I would have a hard time convincing you that is was ok for you to spend your time and money so people could come to my site and earn your commissions for themselves.
Am I being too concerned or is there a way around this? I suppose I could make people sign in prior to buying, although this can hurt sales.
Thanks for your patience and I love this module.
#5
Hey, I completely forgot about this, sorry.
What you are writing about is a common case when dealing with affiliate systems.
The obvious solution here would be to require users to be signed in, if the anonymous access is used to circumvent the system. Every system can be outsmarted, you should just make it hard enough so that most don't try.
#6