Customer disputes charge, affiliate sale, what do I (seller) do?

[bcweb]

Hello,



I'm a seller of digital products and a livid customer just emailed me demanding a refund. She claims she's never heard of my website or products before.



I looked up her email address in my sales records, and a purchase did in fact come from a Google Checkout account under her name and email. The sale came via an affiliate, who I am to give 30% of the sale to.



What should I do in this situation?



If I give the customer a refund, will I still be required to pay the affiliate commission? Or will this affiliate sale be deleted?

[E-junkie_Guru]

If you refund the buyer's original payment item from your Google Checkout account, Google should notify our system of that, so we would adjust your logs and commission totals accordingly. After you refund the payment, you can verify this has happened by looking for the original transaction in your E-junkie Transaction Log; refunded orders are shaded in pink. When you obtain your masspay file next month to pay out commissions earned in February, we generate that file from the state of your logs at that moment for February's sales, accounting for any refunds in that month as well.

[bcweb]

Done. That worked, and the affiliate commission updated accordingly.



Thanks!

[bcweb]

This happened a 2nd time today (twice in 2 days).



Both fraudulent purchases originated from the same affiliate. Does that mean that this affiliate is involved in hacking their accounts? Should I (can I?) ban this affiliate? Should I take some other further action?



I see there has been 1 more purchase originating from this affiliate, but that customer hasn't contacted me yet. Is it safe to say that one is a fraudulent purchase as well?

[E-junkie_Guru]

That's for you to determine, but it could just be that the fraudulent buyer(s) happened to find your site via that affiliate's link, so that affiliate's referral cookie is stuck in their browser for the next 6 months (or until they clear cookies), associating all their fraudulent order attempts with that affiliate yet without having any personal connection to the affiliate.



You might just want to keep an eye on that affiliate's sales (you can select an affiliate in your E-junkie Transaction Log to view only the sales they'd referred) to see how things continue to pan out. We generally recommend waiting until mid-month or later to pay out commissions for the last completed calendar month, which should give plenty of time for any refunds or reversed fraudulent purchases to be processed that could affect commissions; in this case, you might want to wait until the last week of March to pay out February's commissions and see how that affiliate's sales look by then.