Anyone ever NOT been paid by Copeac?

Not taking sides here. But everyone knows the rebill world is in a very precarious state. Everything that is free trial related is such a careful balance. The days of doing whatever you want on the merchant side are done and things are being reigned in. No auto cross sells, upsells, high charge amounts monthly, etc. So it's made it quite the difficult situation for advertisers to make it back out. Where before they were profitable on month one to run more compliant with none of that stuff with the current cpa's it's at like month 2.5 now. Still profitable for them just nothing like it was. So I think that's why you're seeing these things happen. I wouldn't be surprised soon if you saw lengthening terms for rebill traffic as well. A lot of advertisers are making network carry the terms longer because they're not making up the money as fast and a lot don't have the money to float it.

From my understanding the margins have got very small on the advertisers side and they're still carrying a great deal of risk to keep the offers alive. I'm not saying they're going broke but as with anything in life there's a pain/pleasure motivating principle. And honestly I'm sure they were at the point where they were thinking well what do we do. We have a few choices:

A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.

I'm curious what everyone thinks is the best. Their are still a lot of guys that are making good coin on these deals so even with the drama I'm guessing most of you don't want A. B could be done but then you have no knowledge of what's going on. Where with C you have transparency however can wind up in the hole at the end of the month.

Which do you chose?

I personally chose B. for myself as I know what my metrics are constantly and if it stops working I shut it down. I don't like C at all because it's an issue of I may run all month and then have a bunch of chargebacks from the advertiser and find out I lost money on a big campaign. Really I post this question more generaly to all verticals rather then just this specific situation. It's quite common in leads to have 5-10% of them refunded for non-working phone numbers. If I we come to an affiliate with that that's running a campaign and managing profitability they're going to get pissed so the question is what is the right way to handle these situations?

Back to the rebill thing. I'm not sure how many of you know this but the merchant accounts are kept alive by the volume going through. If the volume drops and the chargeback % from visa/mc start coming in from the last few months the ratio's get all out of whack and the merchant account goes down. At that point no one gets paid as there's no money to pay and no merchant account to rebill with. So along with trying to be fair to everyone they have to keep the volume up to keep cb ratio's inline or they can't bill and everyone gets fucked all along the whole line. So when you say why don't they just do..... make sure you're thinking of more then just yourself. It's not a battle of us against them. Don't just assume they're trying to screw you, they're just trying to keep their businesses alive the same as you.

P.S. I don't have any of these offers up through these advertisers currently ( advanced, optimum, int'l acai.... ) but have worked with them in the past. They do what they can to pay their bills and keep offers up so you can all keep making money.
 


There is no way these guys (the advertiser) should be allowed to chargeback affiliates... Like others have said.. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO? WE CANT CHARGEBACK OUR TRAFFIC SOURCES.. An affiliate SHOULD NEVER be held accountable unless they are doing shady shit.
 
Have not been paid in 2 weeks by COPEAC

I have not been paid in 2 weeks. COPEAC owes me over 20k. Mike if you could help get this taken care of that would be great. Thanks
 
What the fuck happened to this thread??? I know for a fact that I quoted this post ...

A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.

... and I'm pretty damn sure this went on for another page or 2
 
From my understanding the margins have got very small on the advertisers side and they're still carrying a great deal of risk to keep the offers alive. I'm not saying they're going broke but as with anything in life there's a pain/pleasure motivating principle. And honestly I'm sure they were at the point where they were thinking well what do we do. We have a few choices:

A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.

I'm curious what everyone thinks is the best. Their are still a lot of guys that are making good coin on these deals so even with the drama I'm guessing most of you don't want A. B could be done but then you have no knowledge of what's going on. Where with C you have transparency however can wind up in the hole at the end of the month.

Which do you chose?

smaxor,

A lot of what you say above is very true and extremely accurate. I am going to add a few thoughts to your post as well...

First of all I can't quite understand why advertisers are taking the "cut throat" approach to the CBs (chargebacks) and blatantly removing conversions from affiliates. This is just going to cause a shit stir (which it should) and cause affiliates to identify companies that run these offers and just stop sending traffic to them altogether - no affiliate is going to put up with that crap.

What actually surprises me is why advertisers don't take a smarter approach to the whole concept of the chargebacks and put together some logic that will scrub the affiliates accordingly. Now before anyone gets all pissed and says "they shouldn't scrub" just stay calm. Advertisers in the shady rebill industry have to scrub and any Advertiser that says they don't scrub is lying - plain and simple.

These advertisers know their chargeback percentage rate from viewing historical data. Let's say for instance an Acai rebill offer has a 40% CB rate - the advertiser better know that from their data otherwise they shouldn't be advertising / pushing a product. That leaves them with 40% they need to set as a baseline and do one of the following...

1) Scrub affiliates so it isn't blatantly noticed by the affiliate
2) Increase their rebill amount
3) Increase their customer retention. This can be done by having a decent product, customer service reps offering discounts for disgruntled customers, etc...

Advertisers also "should have" logic coded into their offers that tracks each affiliate coming from each network. They should have a "risk factor" for each network and each affiliate. That risk factor will be a percentage of chargebacks that have occured against a particular affiliate. The advertiser can then have a sliding "scrub" scale for that particular affiiliate; The affiliates that have less CBs get less scrub, the advertisers that are shitty get more scrubs. The Advertiser can also have a "network level" scrub as well and can adjust the sliding scale manually or automatically depending on what network the traffic is coming from.

It's also just like smaxor said... Advertisers should have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 MIDs running on the backend (some advertisers run on minimal MIDs and are destined for failure from the start). Visa/MC imposes strict rules on CB rates on those MIDs and the bank holding the MID also imposes rules/restrictions. If volume drops on the MIDs and the residual CBs come sliding in the MID or MIDs are going to take a hit - and we all know what happens when you hit 1% on a MID. Even though you may or may not get the MID shut down you keep it up and Visa/MC is going to audit you, slap you, and then keep a close eye on you - you keep it up more and here comes the fines.

There is also logic advertisers can use on their credit card billing page to "aovid" some of the fraud leads... Some advertisers use it and some don't - the ones that don't are stupid and you should actually run some tests before running a shady rebill offer. Advertisers need to not only depend on the gateway but they need to have their own "fraud protection" built in...


  1. Are the advertisers checking IP against physical address and only allowing the card to be processed if they visitor is in X amount of the physical geographical location of the IP being used?
  2. Are they checking the IP against a DB of proxies?
  3. Are they checking the BINs against known VCC bins?
  4. Are they allowing sequential cards that are typically lots of VCCs to be used?
  5. Are they storing conversion IPs? Are they checking their local DB against these IPs to make sure multiple conversions are not occurring on the same IP? If they are conversions on the same people do the advertisers have staff to manually check if the IP is that of a college campus or similar location where IP is a proxy/gateway?
  6. Are they checking octets of the IPs for sequential usages?
  7. Are advertisers spending money on staff that will handle the retrievals?
  8. Is the Staff checking BINs and calling the fraud dept at the consumers bank to try and resolve without it turning into a full CB?
  9. Is the Staff calling the customers in an attempt to reverse the CB and trying to "cut a deal' - maybe offer the rebill for 25% for the next X months (or similar) just so they can "make the customer happy" and still capture revenue?
^^ All these things "should be done" from the advertiser level. This crap of advertisers pushing back the chargebacks on the affiliates is an easy, cheap, and lazy way out of the situation that isn't going to make anybody happy at all. Although these things are not a complete list, it gives you a good idea of the "must have" list when it comes to running a successful offer. It will also keep everybody happy (somewhat). :]

Ok I am going to stop now... All I am basically saying is I wonder if these "Advertisers" that are blatantly taking it out on affiliates are even taking the time to have the correct logic in their backend to "help avoid" the chargebacks and fraud.

Btw... If anyone has read this in their entirety - you are crazy. But if you did read it and know what I am talking about then great. :]

brian
 
A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.
.

I can't believe you are openly admitting it's ok to Shave.

Remind me not to promote your network.

How many offers are you scrubbing right now?
 
I can't believe you are openly admitting it's ok to Shave.

Remind me not to promote your network.

How many offers are you scrubbing right now?

We've gotten over the dilemma of "shaving/scrubbing". It's part of the industry, and we have to deal with it. Actually we as affiliates have forced advertisers to start shaving/scrubbing. Most affiliates are looking to push rebills at $30-$50; any rebills in the $20 range would be ignored by us. Advertisers know that, and even though they cannot afford to offer $30-$50, they do offer it, but add a scrub so that they end up paying let's say $25 per conversion. At this point, it's not a matter of what offer scrubs, and what doesn't, but how much do they scrub by, and in which fashion.

In this thread, the advertiser decided to in a bullshit way to start charging back leads (retroactive scrubbing), which is one of the most retarded things I've seen. I know that I run a lot of campaign on small margins, 15-30% ROI, if an advertiser decided to chargeback 20% of my leads, then I would be royally screwed.

I personally believe that it's up to the network to sustain the chargeback cost, and not pass it to the affiliate. Next step is to stop dealing with that advertiser, or come up with a mutual decision. But passing chargebacks to the affiliates really sucks, and makes me really wary of pushing any offers at the networks that let this happen.
 
EDIT: Supposedly the advertiser might not enforce this scrub, if they dont anyone who was scrubbed will have those leads added back. Maybe they saw this thread, who knows.[/QUOTE]


lol

More like, our traffic dropped off the face of the earth and Copeac's reputation as a network is tarnished. I think we should get these guys paid to save face.
 
Copeac is one of the networks I'd heard so many great things about, and I'd like to send traffic to them, but I've been having a payment issue dating back to May last year.

I remember asking them about the requirements to get switched on to a wire, and they laid down what was necessary for an international affiliate. I needed to cash at least one cheque before I'd be considered.

Well, in those situatons, I normally send enough traffic to push myself over the threshold so that I can cash the cheque before I start sending any kind of volume.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I still haven't had that cheque. I've spoken to my AM on multiple occasions and it's been reissued three times, but I still haven't received it.

Any other UK affs suffered from this kind of problem receiving cheques from them?

I'm not holding Copeac responsible and I don't doubt the integrity of the people I've spoken to when they say that it's been reissued. But it's a pain in the arse. I'd like to run traffic to them but I'm not willing to do so while I'm still waiting on some cheque for a couple of hundred bucks that I need to cash before I can negotiate a wire...
 
As I said on a previous thread, I support COPEAC 100% if they don't pay based on fraud, non-payment, and the occasionally molesting of poodles.
 
We've gotten over the dilemma of "shaving/scrubbing". It's part of the industry, and we have to deal with it. Actually we as affiliates have forced advertisers to start shaving/scrubbing. Most affiliates are looking to push rebills at $30-$50; any rebills in the $20 range would be ignored by us. Advertisers know that, and even though they cannot afford to offer $30-$50, they do offer it, but add a scrub so that they end up paying let's say $25 per conversion. At this point, it's not a matter of what offer scrubs, and what doesn't, but how much do they scrub by, and in which fashion.

In this thread, the advertiser decided to in a bullshit way to start charging back leads (retroactive scrubbing), which is one of the most retarded things I've seen. I know that I run a lot of campaign on small margins, 15-30% ROI, if an advertiser decided to chargeback 20% of my leads, then I would be royally screwed.

I personally believe that it's up to the network to sustain the chargeback cost, and not pass it to the affiliate. Next step is to stop dealing with that advertiser, or come up with a mutual decision. But passing chargebacks to the affiliates really sucks, and makes me really wary of pushing any offers at the networks that let this happen.

You realize though that places that run Linktrust can't shave you. They can add credits/take away sales after the fact though. But you as an affiliate should catch that and ask why. If you aren't sending fraud traffic then it's not your fault the customer does a chargeback.
 
Finch - please IM / email / Call me so i can resolve any issues you're running into....

Stephen Gelber - Director of Operations - COPEAC
AIM - StephenatIMK
Stephen@Intermarkmedia.com
631-719-1250 EXT 3777
Thanks a lot for your help today dude

My problem wasn't Copeac's fault but they've gone out of their way to fix it up for me. Muchos respect. Looking forward to running some proper traffic with them
 
You realize though that places that run Linktrust can't shave you. They can add credits/take away sales after the fact though. But you as an affiliate should catch that and ask why. If you aren't sending fraud traffic then it's not your fault the customer does a chargeback.

That just means the network can't shave/scrub you, but the advertiser still can.