Here is an email I just received from one of my affiliates today

Dear Nuclear Nova:

For the past few months we have been monitoring the download to sale ratios of all of the games that we sell on our site - www.DownloadFreeMacGames.com.

What started us on this review was the movement of one game developer from esellerate to Plimus affiliate program. Within a few days, we started to show sales for his games where in the 90 prior days at esellerate we had none.

I brought this situation to the attention of the esellerate Affiliate Representative and expressed my concern that since us Macintosh Publishers did not have EST capabilities, it appeared that there was quite a bit of leakage (i.e. sales) going on to the detriment of the Publisher (i.e. us).

I was told by this esellerate representative that they were aware of this, that they didn't wish to lose us, and that they were working on the problem.

Since that discussion (back in April/May of this year) other publisher friend(s) have broached this subject with the same Affiliate Rep., and since these publishers deal in Windows applications only, the Affiliate Rep. stated that the Macintosh platform is just not a priority for esellerate, obviously not knowing that that information would get back to us.

We have also concluded that the sale to click ratio for esellerate games that we promote fall way below the click to sale ratio for other games that we offer through Plimus, Gamehouse, and RegNow.

Therefore, effective 12:01 a.m. August 01, 2004, we will cease to offer your games that are affiliated with esellerate. We are sorry to have to do this, but it is not worth our time and effort to proceed under the current circumstances.

Our promotion efforts have been unyielding in trying to promote your games. As an example, DownloadFreeMacGames.com is #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines for the keyword phrase "free mac games." This took alot of effort on our part to get to that position and to maintain it.

If you choose to change affiliations to Plimus or RegNow, we would be honored to represent you on our game pages. Otherwise, we will keep your game pages in our archive in anticipation of representing you again in the future.

Sincerely,

Mark W. Rosenquist, President
MR Business Solutions, LLC
DownloadFreeMacGames.com

I never kept track of that affiliate, but it seams he has sent me over 1500 downloads, which at the current registration rate should have sent me 5-15 registrations, yet he has received 39 clicks to the web store and 0 purchases! I sent an email to eSellerate, I hope they can get this fixed!

Why not just switch to Plimus? It sounds like eSellrate really doesn't have much interest in fixing the problem.

Originally posted by Mark Fassett
Why not just switch to Plimus? It sounds like eSellrate really doesn't have much interest in fixing the problem.

And i would affiliate your games too :)

pat.

That looks pretty good, I am going to have to try them soon, I will make a post to affiliates after I get signed up with them.

I think any developer wanting to do an affiliate program should look beyond eSellerate. I've been pleasantly pleased SWreg since writing my post on what it is like to be an affiliate. I've seen sales with all of the systems, hundreds with some, 0 with esellerate, I tend to agree that it is not worth an affiliates time.

Speaking of this, i'm with BMT Micro. Has anyone here joined their affiliate thing? Does it get you a few sales? Would it be worth my time to do it? What percentages do you offer, if so (I guess you set your own)?

Thanks!

Derek
www.stormcloudcreations.com

Originally posted by cyrus_zuo
I think any developer wanting to do an affiliate program should look beyond eSellerate. Most of the sites we have done affiliations with dictate which eCommerce system to use (since all their games use the same one to provide a consistent experience for their audience).

So, from our perspective, it's the affiliates that should look beyond eSellerate...we generally support whatever system they prefer to use.

One more data tidbit: We had one affiliate that took our eSellerate EST installer and created their own installer by taking the game EXE that our EST installer installed on their system. Well, the EST installer is the EXE that places the eSellerate info on the users's system...not the game EXE (standard eSellerate EST stuff). So, this affiliate was distributing a game that did not carry their affiliate info with it.

We were able to credit them for all of their sales (there was a bunch, actually, which is how we noticed). Because they didn't tell us they made their own installer...we weren't able to warn them that the EST info would be lost. Hopefully other affiliates have not done something similar and lost commisions because of it.

We do the most with eSellerate and RegNow in terms of affiliation. We're seeing many more sales with eSellerate...but that could just be due to the quality of our eSellerate affiliates...not the system itself.

I personally think they both have their strengths and weaknesses. However, we recently tweaked our build process to make it trivial to make custom RegNow builds, so I'm probably leaning towards RegNow a bit more...mainly because it's a little simpler for both parties.

I do think eSellerate has some cool features...and they support the Mac which is something we're using now (and it's working pretty well as far as I can tell).

At the end of the day, we don't really care as we tend to support all of them and provide the affiliate with whatever they need. If an affiliate is losing commissions, we would of course want to remedy that situation.

I think I already mentioned that some people that we've talked to refuse to buy the game unless they're on a web page and see the secure icon at the bottom. These people won't buy using eSellerate's in-game buy process.

Having a few options is at least good for some competition among the eCommerce providors. :)
-Scorpio