There’s been a number of complaints recently over at the normally peaceful a4uforums from merchants and networks about Affiliates being abusive towards them. I have a strange feeling that these instances may all be connected, and there may only be 1 abusive affiliate out there giving everyone (and the industry as a whole) a bad name.

The first instance was about a month ago now, when Matt and the team introduced “reputation points” – a way of indicating whether someone’s posts were helpful or not. One member (who IIRC had one of the highest post counts on the forum, and a negative “reputation score” due to his posts) decided he didn’t like this, and rather than give reasoned debate as to the pros and cons of such a system, decided to tell everyone to go **** themselves and to shove the rep system up their ****. Nice.

For this, he was given a warning. Which turned into a ban thanks to his response, which you’ll find (nearly.. swear filter is turned on…) in full over at Clarke’s Blog.

Lee from Chiltern Online Services (who manages the Jason Shankey program on AW and Webgains) told the tale yesterday of an affiliate who sent a threatening and rude reply to an email Lee had sent regarding a problem with the shopping cart system that obviously impacted on their affiliates. This as yet un-named affiliate it would appear could not find either the “unsubscribe” link nor the time to actually promote Jason Shankey, yet he has plenty of time to threaten affiliate managers.

And just today, Adam from Affiliate Window has brought to our attention yet another instance of an affiliate sending downright rude and abusive emails to a merchant – In this case a relatively new merchant to the Affiliate Marketing world. God only knows what they must think of affiliates as a whole if this person is anything to go by! Here’s a snippet of their email:

Believe me, that wasn’t rude, rude is saying that you haven’t got a f****** clue, cherry picked? You can pick cherries out of my f****** arse, your be bankrupt within a few years if that.

Now thats rude.

Your still a f****** ***** who hasn’t got a clue, now that’s even ruder.

You don’t cherry pick or whatever you want to call it, affiliates, we make more money per year than you spend on toilet paper.

Get a f****** reality check on yourself.

Hope this reply was more ruder than you was expecting

Ignoring the obvious lack of education that this affiliate must have (”more ruder than you was expecting”?), he seems to believe that the affiliate marketing industry must really be booming if affiliates earn more commission in a year than a merchants annual expenditure of toilet roll?? I suppose if the merchant in question was a laxative tester or something that might actually be an achievement.

In my opinion, there’s no excuse for sending this sort of email. None at all. These affiliates (if they are not all the same person) should be kicked out of all networks, not just the ones that have received complaints. They’re damaging the industry, and might have caused that merchant to think twice about Affiliate Marketing.

We all feel like sending an email like that at some point, but your average sane, reasonable person counts to ten, breaths deeply, and either spends their time more constructively doing something else, or re-phrases what they feel like saying into a polite, coherent email.

For example, just the other day, I wanted to send the following email to one of the 3 networks that I seem to be struggling to get to actually pay me at the moment:

**** you, you ********. Just pay me the ******* money you owe me before I come round and stick a ***** up your ****.

Which I managed to re-phrase as:

I still don’t appear to have received payment for the 5 outstanding invoices, despite assurances from yourself that this would be paid last week. Could you please let me know as a matter of urgency what is happening, as I cannot continue to work with you whilst you have this level of arrears.

See? It’s easy when you know how. There’s no excuse for not being polite, and there’s certainly no excuse at all for being abusive You wouldn’t stand for it in the street – If it happened in the workplace, it would be a disciplinary offence. There’s no reason to stand for it just because it’s done via e-mail. Virtual abuse is still abuse. And there’s no place for it in our industry.

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