(BFG 9000 hat on)

All very good points & very well made.
I guess experience (not of POR) has made me slightly pessimistic…..

I’ll crawl back in to my hole at BFG Towers now!

TTFN

BFG

Ok so let’s forget about this specific tracking method for just a moment and I explain what we do if we see multiple orders from the same IP Address or same Cookie (Flash or Regular cookie) within a short space of time (hours) then it will be red flagged to us anyway, as that can be a key indictor of possible fraud, which is then investigated.

So if your situation did happen then it would be spotted by our automated fraud monitors, but going back to tracking using IP Address, the window is very small anyway, the maximum time we will track using just the IP Address is 6 hours from the click. And IP Address is a last resort to use for tracking and only comes in when other forms of tracking used turns up nothing, hence why it has a low usage % in our stats.

The real fact of the matter is most people who use the web have cookies on at least on a per session basis before wiping them. The people who have cookies turned off fully will find it hard, to near impossible to order anything from many sites, and it’s these people who after clicking on a link, then enable cookies to order. That is one of the many scenarios this has been designed for, our goal is to accurately and fairly track all sales originating from Affiliate traffic to the benefit of all party’s involved and I feel as a network we do this rather well.

There is a ton of ways Merchants get sales for free, and really on both sides of the fence I would estimate the percentage we are talking about to be so small that there is no point in worrying about it, otherwise we should all just shut up shop and do something else.

(merchant hat still on)

I’m still not convinced though.
Let’s take Merchant X as an example – I know they could block their own IP but – they can’t block mine?

If I was to click on an affiliate link now – Merchant X would end up paying commission on every sale to any of the 10′s of thousands of users mentioned for the next 6 hours.

This would happen because they all have identical browser agents, & are percieved to be at the same IP address.

I would imagine that most very large networks would also have identical browser agents for all users too.

(merchant hat off – affiliate hat on)
This is great – it minimises leakage & I may even get commission I didn’t earn.

TTFN

BFG

We only use IP Tracking if the others all turn up nothing, and it’s only for a period of 6 hours from the click. We secondly compare the browser agent, even if a whole office is using the same browser, there may be differences in the user agent such as third party toolbars/extensions, patch level etc. This prevents the majority of the situations you are talking about. Lastly any merchant can block their IPs from the Affiliate Network so if I was to guess based on all I have said above, maybe 1 sale in a blue moon but the other flip side is I could list you 20 ways merchants don’t have to pay for sales that should have tracked but didn’t and as you can see from our IP percentage it’s not a huge amount on it’s own.

(Merchant Hat On)…..

Do POR automatically switch to IP if there’s no cookie (‘advanced’ or flash) present?

Do you have any stats (or guesses) as to what % of sales tracked via IP shouldn’t have tracked at all? http://blog.bfg9000.co.uk/the-problem-with-cookie-free-tracking/

TTFN

BFG