Today I noticed an email from a marketer, in mid-launch, who alerted his affiliates that his payment processer authorize.net was down and so he's extending the launch.

At first I though "oh that's the typical story like the server melted and they need to relaunch/extend" [actually this happens all the time - servers do melt during successfull launches because the marketers under invest in processor power and have no clue about server clouds and scalable hosting services].

But after thinking about it I realized - oh crap I'm an affiliate for some merchants and some of them use authorize.net.

And worse than that, I'm also doing some ppc traffic generation for several affiliate programs which means I'm totally wasting my clicks unless they have some hard-coded affiliate tracking to catch commissions later.

But most likely even those sales are lost because the person will see some error page and never come back.

Then I thought "So I better turn off my ppc traffic ASAP"

So you see the chain of damage this event is causing. Hundreds of thousands of merchants having thousands of affiliates who are looking for alternate paths to send their traffic.

Even Google could be affected as it means ppc campaigns will be paused by merchants and their ppc affiliates.

If you're a merchant who's using authorize.net here's what I suggest you do:

1) Check the latest status of the authorize.net situation via the authorize.net twitter account

2) If your sales processing is totally down as a result, put up a simple order form to capture the email address of the buyer, and tell them you'll contact them when the site is back up AND offer them some discount e.g. 10% off - this will dramatically save your orders. If you can do it, try capture the affiliate id of the affiliate who sent you that customer, and manually give them credit for the sale later.

3) Tell your affiliates asap what you're doing, so you don't piss them off and if they are ppc affiliates they'll especially thank you.

4) After this blows over, mail your entire customer database with a special promotion - you can make a ton of sales from your existing customers and this is a great "reason why" to mail them.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Cheers,

Peter

Affiliate-Software-Review.com

--- (Edited on 7/3/2009 11:36 am [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---