[CanadianDave]

I am having a problem getting paid by a merchant and I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem and what steps you took to resolve it.

I have a merchant (not going to name names) that just closed their small in-house program at the end of Q4 2010. Last week I had to send them an email to request final payment of my commissions. It's not a huge sum of money but it is money that I earned so it's more about the principle.

The merchant raised the fact that I had replaced their links on the landing page with links from their competition. They requested that I delete the page because it is in a folder using their name (example: mydomain-name.com/merchantname). I entirely agree that this is not a good thing but this page has good traffic and I cannot just pull it down. So I set up a 301 redirect to the page in a different folder (mydomain-name.com/NEWmerchantname). I think they are partially mad because my landing page performs so well against their merchant page.

Well, the merchant saw this and said that this wasn't good enough because they could still reach the old page through search engine results (and now it redirected to the competitions page). When I explained that it was a proper 301 redirect and that it would get re-indexed soon - this is how they replied:

"This is all fine by me.
I don't want to be a stickler on this after all this time.

That said, I would feel more comfortable with paying your final invoice ($399.60) once this page has been removed.

Keep me posted in a few weeks when you're comfortable taking it down and I'll fire you off a payment.
I hope you find this fair."

I replied that this was not okay to link payment of earned affiliate commissions with search engine indexing. They did not reply.

It's not like I am going to starve, I am just upset that this guy thinks he can withhold payment until I remove the page. I consider this holding my commission hostage.

What would you do?

[Bill]

What a jerk. With an attitude like that I would likely pull the pages (using redirects to my home page) - get paid (if it's really going to happen) - then put the pages back up. After that I would SEO the hell out of them, both NEWmerchantname and OLDmerchantname.

Disclaimer: IANAL - but am sometimes a bit vindictive. If I was earning money in that niche I would certainly want to keep doing so, and would also expect to get paid for prior moneys earned.

[Zeus]

I agree, this guy is a jerk. You earned that money. You're not responsible for their decision to close the program. He has to pay you first then discuss how he can compensate you for the loss of traffic if you remove your pages.

You can remove the pages during a period to get paid and then put them back if there's no TM involved.

[CanadianDave]

Thanks Bill and Zeus,

In the big picture, it's probably a good thing that his program closed. It was not very lucrative and not really worth my time (when it was open or now).

In all honesty, I don't plan on screwing around with the old landing page. I will not stoop to playing games like that. I have already wasted too much time for such a small amount of money - it's his loss not mine. The funny thing is that the 301 has worked and Google has quickly re-indexed the page and my new landing page has taken the place of the old page in the results. So he has gained nothing except having his company name removed from my URL. Little does he realise that this URL was probaly helping his SEO.

Thanks for the ideas!

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by mecorp28

I was wondering can you give out this name (products or service you are affiliating) so other affiliate know about this. (so caution can be taken)

This thread is OVER A YEAR OLD. Also, it's mentioned that the program is CLOSED...