South West eCommerce

A time ago we were considering getting more serious about affiliate marketing.  We thought there might be a fast way to do it, and we had a go at purchasing a trading, profitable website.

If you read our regular monthly analysis, you’ll be able to identify this as site G.  Site G was for sale from a place where English isn’t the first language.  It was for sale at a rate which seemed reasonable and not actually too good to be true.  It was for sale in a place where to go and check the details would be really expensive, and would change the value of the purchase in the first place.

We got printouts of the guy’s earnings from his affiliate site, and as far as we can still tell, they were real.

We went to the discussion boards to look for the seller and didn’t find him listed as any sort of a crook.  We checked his history on ebay and he had been trading for years with no bad reports.

I’m suspicious that the way the site was built into an earner was to use stolen credit cards to make purchases on the site, and expect that a month later they’d all be rescinded.  When a punter calls to ask about earnings, he’s shown a couple of sales a day and room to improve.  What he gets is an established site with a business model that seems viable and a sales record that isn’t sustainable.

The amount of money we spent hurt us.  We had to borrow it and we’re still repaying the loan.  What we got was a site that was designed to do what it claimed to do and technically, was doing it.  What we also got was a sales record that stopped the day the cash cleared escrow.

Our next move was to go back to the seller and demand an answer as to why this happened.  A few sales trickled in and we were convinced to hold off a few days.  When it turned out to be only a trickle, we came at him pretty hard over the email and to cut a long story short, we got about half our money back. 

Part of our strategy was to go to message boards all over the shop and start to tell the story.  Clearly the seller was ready to sell more sites and this started to hurt him instantly.  Soon enough there was a deal struck where for half our cash we shut up and pulled down our stories about him.  If we had more leverage, for instance if we had access to him, we’d have managed a better outcome, but we reduced our losses and undertook not to broadcast our bad experience any more.  He never confessed to defrauding us, but there is no doubt in our minds that the sales record was artificially generated.

So why, as embarrassed as we are about it, tell the story now?  The seller went quiet after dealing with us.  We were confused about that but our explosion onto the notice boards brought other suckers out of the woodwork.  We imagine that it was a good rort and the seller has more than one persona, he just turns into someone else when things get hot, and we’d heated the pool for him.  We set up an alert on ebay to tell us when anything else is for sale by the seller and a couple of days ago, another ebay auction fired up.

This time it’s much cheaper.... we don’t know what to make of it, but we’re sure the figures being presented won’t be real.  Even though the guy is a crook, we undertook to not broadcast his name and we kind of think we should honour that.  It’s time to say it out loud though, this is a world where sharks circle and devour those who aren’t clever enough to avoid it.  We’re not even sad we decided we had to do something to get into the affiliate marketing world, we just wish we were smart enough not to get taken.

So the message behind this is... do your diligence.  If you reach a point where you don’t feel you’ve completely satisfied yourself the deal is completely for real, then you haven’t.  We’ll buy a site again, but we’ll actually shake hands with the seller in future and sit in their office while they show us how it all works.  We’ll see the originals of the bank statements, we’ll drill it all to death, and it might mean that we have to do bigger deals to make the energy worth it.  If it means getting out the overnight bag and the passport, then so be it.