Cautionary tale

[charliedog]

I will start by saying I am very happy with BMT Micro and my affiliates. No problems there.

But I was caught out by a weird thing with the discount scheme. I wanted to give an affiliate a 50% discount on Snaky Jake. I was prepared to make less money on the sales than had they been through my site but I figured that sales where sales and less money was better than none. I set the scheme up and the affiliate used it and sold a game. But when the sales figures came back I found that instead of making a bit less money I had made a *lot* less money. In fact I had made a 1 cent loss! Heres how it breaks down:

Game retails at $14.99 USD
discount was for 50%
So discount price was $7.99 USD

Now I assumed that the affiliate percentage was for the final price... Not so! It's for the full price. So in this case

Gross income was $7.99 USD
Affliate took 40% of full price = $6.00 USD
Retailer took $1.50 USD

I get -0.01 cent :)

I mention this to warn other people to be really careful how they set up the discount scheme. Make sure you read the small print and understand how it works. If sales had been bigger and the percentages worse I could have lost a lot of money.

regards,

Tony Oakden
http://charliedoggames.com

[MacMan45]

I understand your message, but you lost me on the maths...

Game retails at $14.99 USD
discount was for 50%
So discount price was $7.99 USD

It might make more sense if...
50% 0f $14.99 is $7.49 :P (which makes the 1 cent loss right, before I noticed that, i had you at a 50c gain :p )

[charliedog]

Hey MacMan45 your right! I should have checked my maths. Anyway the point is that I didn't make as much as I had expected :)

[Jamie W]

People will screw you over left-right-centre. It's a simple fact of life, just human nature (greed) and to be expected. So if you consider that every single person you have dealings with, would like to screw you over, you'll not go far wrong.

The thing to do is to make sure every single minute detail is written down and that you understand fully all the ins and outs of a deal. If there are any grey areas, don't proceed until you're 100% clear.

Thanks for the heads up though charliedog.

[arcadetown]

fyi... Our BMT rep said this is correct and is intentional as their thoughts are if an affiliate joins a program and expects to get commission X for selling product priced at Y, however the developer offers some sort of discount on their site the affiliate may think was bait-n-switch when didn't end up getting their % of X.

[princec]

Yep, I'd be especially annoyed if that happened to me, so I think they're doing it right.

Cas :)

[rmedtx]

Thanks for sharing that experience with us charliedog. I'm sorry that happened to you.

[charliedog]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

It was only one sale and 1cent. At the time I was very annoyed but in retrospect it's more funny than annoying and will probably become an amusing anecdote for me to bring out when I tell people about my early experiences in the casual games scene :) It could have been a lot worse too.

I don't believe that anyone was intentionally trying to screw me. I just wanted to bring this to other peoples attention so they'd be aware of how the system works and avoid the same mistake.