You are correct, it is not impossible to shave with NATS. We have said that all the time. BUT one thing you HAVE to understand is that we do not let any of our clients shave. If anyone IS found to shave around NATS we WILL terminate their license and we WILL sue them.

And on top of that we make it as difficult as possible for anyone to shave.

Also, the fact that all our clients KNOW we will sue them when they shave and KNOW we will terminate their license, is something that protects the affiliate. We have a close eye on our clients and they know. If anyone does shave somehow we WILL catch them, there is no doubt there.

Anyone using NATS would have to put a lot of effort into it to shave without everyone noticing they are doing it. And even if they figure out a way to do so, we ARE going to detect it and the shit will hit the fan. People investing the time and energy to learn and use NATS to its fullest capabilities will not even THINK about trying to shave because they do not have to to be competitive in this industry.

That was the only reply this thread needed.. Right at the beginning.

No offence Nathan but, there is absolutely no way that you could find out if a client of yours was shaving.. specifically if they didnt include the NATs tracking on their tour pages or, are you saying that you check every one of your clients paysites 24/7/365? Very impressive if you do, i would love to be able to afford someone to surf thousands of paysites every second, every hour, of every day :thumbsup

Again, no offence but you dont. It has already been stated that all a program has to d is utilize a php include into a tour page and you and the affiliates would be non the wiser.

Looking forward to seeing the first ever lawsuit in the industry about shaving :thumbsup

It will certainly set a precedent thats for sure :glugglug

No they wouldnt.

As i said though, the first comment you made in your post was all that was needed in this thread. It is exactly what i said in my original post yet for watever reason, the points people were arguing had nothing to do with those comments lol

Glad to see you are in agreement that its possible to shave even when an affiliate program uses NATs technology.. kudos :thumbsup

Now if you could figure a way out to have all the paysite tours included in an 'admin' area or have your script generate the tour pages.. that would be something worth marketing :2 cents:

Regards,

Lee

Oh and ever so quickly, on the subject of editing the MySQL database to 'drop' sales etc.

Why not have the MySQL data encoded in addition to the php coding? Would certainly make it a LOT harder for dishonest programs to shave sales if you did.

Regards,

Lee

There is no practical way to do this.

Curious though, how exactly would the NATS guys figure out one of their customers is shaving?

I'd imagine that as soon as word got out that sponsor company X was shaving, they'd have bigger worries than a lawsuit from a company who's software they license.

From my understanding of php/MySQL it should actually be quite easy to do.

You simply have a 'key' based on the amount of seconds from a given date for example:

Based on the date/time of this post the key would be something like:

A - 1
B - 2
C - 3
D - 4
E - 5

etc etc

The script would write the data to MySQL using that key so that the word 'BAD' would appear as '214' in the MySQL database.

The script would know the key but, an affiliate program wouldnt.

Regards,

Lee

If the script "knows" the key, than the affiliate program also "knows" the key.

If the code is installed on the affiliate program's server, there are many ways to reverse engineer whatever methodthey are using to encode the data. Obviously with something like shaving there is enough of a financial incentive for them to do it.

True enough but, its one more safeguard NATs would include to deter their users from shaving which right now, they dont have :2 cents:

Plus, im sure it would be possible to have the key write the data on the fly so that every time a sale was made, the key was generated dynamically based on the time of the sale.

Regards,

Lee

If you tried these techniques you would see posts here at GFY saying, "What the fuck [program]? I had a sale at 1am and then it just disapeared! This is not the first time either!!!"

When that post comes in, you get John sniffing around your ass for why a NATS program is possibly shaving... If it is, pull the license. Simple.

But here is the point. It isn't easy to shave and by far shaving isn't the worst thing you can do in the first place. The worst thing you can do is let your program run down and have shitty websites with cookie-cutter designs. Fail to update your members areas with fresh good content and fail to update your affiliate areas with fresh clean content.

So if you are going to post a thread about shit, talk about what is happening at a higher percentage and can be quantified. The fact is you don't know, first hand, of a program that is shaving for sure even if they are using an affiliate system that includes it as an option. But I am sure you know of some that piss their content money away on bling-bling and the program suffers and goes to shit. So talk about them.

Come on... Do us all a favor and tell us who they are! While you are at it, tell us who shaves!

You are wrong, there are ways to do it, and we do them every day. There are consistancy things we can check at any time to see if something weird is going on. We do not need to monitor a program every second to figure it out.


You stated that, yes. Did I actually tell you that this would help you? As far as I remember I did not. Do tell me, what would you do in your so great php include to shave? Enlighten me.

This is not needed to protect against shaving.

unfortuanly, thats the big problem in this biz. :2 cents:

At the busiest traffic times of any given site..

You have a .php include on your join form which changes to a 'affiliate link code free' version of the join form.

In much the same way that you can specify a certain image shows on a certain day/time on a .php page.

Its not really rocket science.

Regards,

Lee

You are correct, what is needed are honest sponsors unfortunately, they are few and far between.

Would you not agree that enabling NATs to generate a paysites tour pages would be a much better way to monitor whether or not a tour is shaving?

Afterall, you could embed the NATs tracking script in EVERY tour page automatically.

Regards,

Lee

NATS would still register the sale to the correct affiliate.

How? There would be no way of checking the data being sent LOL

Do you not grasp what i am saying? The surfer is being shown a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT join page to the one being used by the NATs system.

Regards,

Lee

Since changing stuff on a tour does not let you shave around NATS, the answer to this is no.

LOL you really arent understanding what i am saying at all.

If there is NOTHING on a tour relating to NATs, how can you tell what is and what isnt being sent where? Simple.. you cant.

Regards,

Lee

Considering that you would still use the same billers as with NATS, you would

1) Miss stats and membership management.
2) Have a sale register in NATS but no NATS join form associated with it which triggers a flag.
3) Other data from the biller might register in NATS but no NATS join form associated with it which triggers even more flags.


IF you would use a totally different biller, you would miss even more stats and membership management causing issues at a later point and with member access to the paysites.

You would also most likely lose more money than you gain because you lose the powerful cascading NATS can offer.

I answered this in my other post, so lets just stick to one about the same subject to not get totally confused.

So you are in agreement that changing the join form / tour page would result in shaving and NATs not actually tracking an affiliate sale. Good.

Regards,

Lee

Who said im using the same processors?

If im already cheating webmasters by shaving their traffic.. im certainly not going to use a processor that i have already setup in my installation of NATs.

Regards,

Lee

This is the same topic.

You said you could track all affiliate data when using NATs.

Im saying that by changing the tour page.. you cant thus, an affiliate program can shave their affiliates, its the same point, just using a different example.

Regards,

Lee

LOL.. yes, you MIGHT be able to shave around 10 sales before so many flags have risen that you will have us asking you a LOT of very uncomfortable questions about what exactly you are doing there.

It depends a lot on what EXACTLY you are doing on the join pages and how you handle the join pages. And its going to be extremely hard (if not impossible) to do it in a way that NATS would not notice weirdness in the installation.

Also, it will be very noticable that a join is not NATS handled so resellers might notice it when checking out your tour and warn us about it also so we can take a look and verify.

Its not as easy as you think.

Seriously, it wouldnt be to hard at all.

If a company wants to shave their webmasters, they will find a way, NATs in use or not.

Regards,

Lee

So you will on top of losing money by nolonger being able to cascade, also lose money because of not pushing most of your sales to the same processors. You would also make it TOTALLY obvious that something fishy is going on because suddenly sales go through a totally different biller. So you will shave what? 15% to not make it deadly obvious in your stats, but you would also lose around 20% of your regular sales because of no cascading?

So you lose 5% because you shave, and you would make it easy for us to detect and kill your license and ruin your reputation in the industry, awesome idea ;)

So you do agree that it is not as easy as you thought it was.

Great

So you are saying there are no legitamate reasons why a sponsor wouldnt instantly change processors at a certain part of the day? Interesting.

If an affiliate program is shaving @ 15% and losing 20% of 'affiliate' sales, the sponsor program gains more in the long term. Simple mathematics tells us that a $3.95 trial paying out $35 loses the sponsor more money.

Its actually cost effective for a sponsor program to shave 15% of their affiliates sales.. they save $35 for each regular sale they do make PLUS the make money on the rebills.

Lose 5% of a $3.95 sale or lose $35 from a $3.95 sale.. which is the option that works out better for the sponsor program here? ;)

Regards,

Lee

No.

It is as simple as changing a tour page. Period.

Regards,

Lee

anyone can shave no matter what software they use, just by changeing the sign up page would do that.

Apparently not, if they use NATs :1orglaugh

Even though 90% of the people who have read this thread now realise it is that easy.

Regards,

Lee

Just wanted to quote you again for those who may have missed your agreeing with my facts.

Despite using smoke and mirrors to try to retract your agreement.

Regards,

Lee

I would have thought everyone would know that, wouldnt they? Or am I just being niave?

Well it would seem a lot of webmasters think NATs is a system that makes shaving impossible.

This thread is educating those webmaster though :glugglug

Regards,

Lee

well if someone cant see how easy it is to shave any system they shouldnt be a webmaster at all.

But there is a way round this if its something that bothers people so much, shall I tell, how you can make it imposible to shave?

Start your own paysite ;)

I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to shve themselves although, this is GFY so you never know ;)

Regards,

Lee

ah close but no cigar, impossible for a sponsor to shave you the affiliate.

You wanna know :)

There is no way.

If a sponsor wants to shave their affiliates, they WILL find a way.

Regards,

Lee

I think you're not able to tie your shoes....

Actually, I did not say that. I said that it would be obvious if you switch from a NATS join and biller to a non-nats join and biller.

On a NATS controlled site, if you have a $3.95 trial join, converting to $34.95, using all features NATS offers to maximize your retention, lets say your average retention is only 1.5 months (which is very low). Meaning per member you make around $56,38.

You payout $35 leaving 21,38 for you.

Going by my example, shaving 15% off would mean you are really only paying $29.75 meaning you keep $26.63 instead. Considering now that due to the shaving you lose 20% of the sales while you shave since cascading is nolonger possible for those, means you lose 3% of all your sales or $1.69 per member. Meaning you only make $24.94.

On TOP of that your retention on those sales, considering you use the same join options, are going to drop a LOT compared to NATS, simply because of our features that we offer which will be very complicated to still use without using our join form. Lets say you lose 0.5 retention, keeping only 1 month on average, means you lose $17.48 on 15% of your sales which means $2.62 per sale. Meaning you now keep $22.32.

Ok, great, you just shaved your affiliates 15%, ruined your reputation because we have found that you shave and now you make $0 instead, and all that for NOT EVEN $1 per member?! Now thats awesome business thinking...

Your right, I guess, theres always a way.

But how about this. I guess you would need to be a big player, who is trusted.

Take CCBill for example. You host the tour including the sign up page (just before you get taken through to CCBills secure server) with the members area of the tour still being pointed towards the sponsors members area.

I am not retracting my agreement. I still agree it is possible to shave even if a program uses NATS.

You will just not get away with it ;)