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Checking out Google….
Ola readers! Rumors of my retirement are exaggerated. I am however looking a little more like Wayne Porter every day 
I’ve been following the Google Checkout issue with some interest having read posts by Sam Harrelson and Connie Berg & a number of ABestWebbers which I detailed in a previous post.
The issue started with Google Checkout apparently not crediting affiliates for sales referred. IMHO it’s not Google that’s at fault here.
I’ve been digging around the Google Checkout system and just like any other shopping cart that does not allow 3rd party pixels to be hosted in their environment they *can* pass transaction variables back to merchants - it’s just a matter of configuring the carts and setting up the systems to do so.
These issues crop up when Merchants that are not technically advanced, but need to offer consumers a wide variety of payment mechanisms, don’t fully evaluate the implications of their actions and launch new shopping carts without fully considering the effect it’ll have on publishers when commissionable sales ‘leak’ from the system.
It potentially damages the merchants reputation and can negatively affect the performance of the affiliate program as a whole. This can easily start a downward spiral that is a nightmare for an affiliate manager to manage.
For more info on integrating shopping carts into affiliate programs and passing variables from Google back to merchants to trigger their own thank-you pages visit the Google Checkout Group code.google.com
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Hi Jonathan,
Unfortunately are most merchants with an affiliate program not that sophisticated. I dare to speculate that the “invention” of the 1×1 pixel image tracking/little to nothing code changes necessary and you are up and running was and is a big selling point and merchants launch an affiliate program without any plan or strategy. The entry cost and time is so little in most cases. $1,500 or even (much) less (excluding LS) and 1 hour of work split over 1 or 2 working days and you can have a program up and running.
This creates issues down the road of course, because most newbies to affiliate marketing don’t know about the labor it takes to RUN a program. Starting one is nothing. That is a different story though, but explains a lot of smaller issues.