Yesterday was an absolute nightmare for me… I promoted a Clickbank script (and a different one - more on that in another blog post) and the delivery process was not really error-free.

All I wanted was to give my subscribers a great product at a very affordable price ( at $7 - most similar scripts cost more than $40).

Here's what happened when I sent out my offer:

1.) People clicked the URL and were sent to the product owner's site using my affiliate URL

2.) A lot of my subscribers ordered the product and I got the full 100% commissions - paid to my Paypal account

3.) The button in Paypal "Return to merchant" didn't send them to the download page but to a page with an error message.

4.) The buyers which I had sent over to the site, opened tickets on my helpdesk or sent me direct emails asking for the download link

5.) I couldn't service them because it was not my product - it was a 100% commission offer using the $7 script

6.) I contacted the product owner and got an email back several hours later

7.) So basically I had to wait until the product owner read his emails and then I had to forward him the support requests I got…

There were several problems for me. I sent out the message with the offer quite early. It was at around 1 PM of my time which was about 6 AM EST. Most people are still sleeping at a time like this.

I got several tickets where the buyers wanted to get their item A.S.A.P (several people also wrote it like this in their emails). I couldn't send them the download link because of the reasons which you can read below in the explanation about $7 sales. It was a bad situation to be in because the product wasn't mine and it wasn't even located on my own server. I had to wait for the product owner to react…

Several hours later, I got to know why the first series of sales bombed and produced error messages. It was because the seller was using a MODIFIED version of the $7 script - he wanted more automation. This modification caused the errors (I had promoted several other $7 offers in the past and these errors had never happened before).

He used the auto return IPN feature and activated it in the script. This caused a conflict with the settings in my own Paypal account because I ALSO had auto return enabled for sales of my own products. It seems that the script took MY Paypal auto return settings instead of his. Now I am not a PHP programmer so I didn't understand it until he told me about his modification.

Basically, I had to switch off the automatic delivery of my own products to make the $7 script of this seller work. Until I got to know this and could take measures, several dozens of orders had already gone through the system. These buyers had to be contacted by email, one by one. I hope, you have received your product in the meantime if you were affected by the error yourself.

It can be quite difficult for inexperienced buyers to understand the whole process behind it. That's why I wrote this article in the first place…

What does the $7 Dollar script do?

Basically, the script works like this: The order button is linked to a PHP page and this order page gets the product details and owner details from a different PHP file. It uses a standard Paypal email address (which can be written into a settings.php file) to transfer the money and the product details to the site owner's Paypal account.

When someone else promotes the product owner's site, the standard Paypal email address of the owner gets replaced by the affiliate's Paypal email address and thus the affiliate gets the full order price paid to HIS Paypal account - it's a 100% commission item in this case.

The standard link for the product owner goes like this:

http://www.productownerurl.com/?e=paypalemail@productowner.com

When the affiliate wants to send him customers, the affiliate uses a link in the following format:

http://www.productownerurl.com/?e=paypalemail@affiliate.com

A lot of people are not familiar with the principles of the $7 script (this concept was invented by Jonathan Leger). Therefore a little explanation of the concept and idea behind it: The seller sells his product (e.g. an ebook or a script) very cheaply so he can get a lot of sales. He's offering affiliates 100% on this item in order to build a list of customers (and sometimes in order to show a one time offer on which he makes more money, too - like the resell rights to the item purchased).

This way, both profit: The product owner because he can then promote other products to these buyers in the future and the affiliate (me in this case) because he's getting paid the full purchase price. Because of this reason, buyers were seeing MY details in yesterday's purchase receipts, not the product owner's.

It's still his product and his product support, though. Therefore, I can't take over the full support from him. The product owner's goal is to build a list and if I would be sending my customers the link to the download, it would forfeit the whole sale principle and idea behind it.

Again: It's a 100% commission item - meaning he stays the owner of the product and I am not getting access to his webserver or something like that. I am getting the full purchase price for it, yes. But it's automated by the $7 script. If it weren't for this script, several items a lot of successful sellers have been selling in the past would have been sold at a much higher price!!

I have learned my lesson, though. If I am promoting such an item in the future, I will make sure that the product owner is actually awake and can help my customers if something goes wrong with their purchase. Buyers should also take into consideration that selling online is not always without mistakes. Sometimes, a return URL can have a spelling error in there and the URL can't be found because of this. Or a file has been uploaded to a wrong folder on a server. These things can happen.

We product sellers are only human and humans are making mistakes. Not always but mistakes CAN happen. If you ever encounter something like this, you can be sure that I will be doing my best to help you as quickly as possible. Using my helpdesk will be the quickest way to get a response from me and it's the safest way to contact me because emails get lost and with all those spam filters in place, it's simply getting unreliable.

If you're not getting an answer immediately, you also have to take into consideration the time difference (a difference of at least 7 hours between Germany and the US). So here in Germany it could be 7 hours later than where you live - I mean, you certainly will understand that I need some sleep as well, right…?

Please leave your comments on this, I am interested in hearing what you think about this… Could I have done something different to avoid this (apart from sending out the message at a different time)? Did I react correctly? Have you had similar experiences in the past… ? Let me know.

Tags: adsense, affiliate, affiliates, clickbank, ebook