Got My Panties.com In A Bunch

Eric Nagel

15 years ago

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

There’s not much worse than screwing an affiliate out of a bonus he/she earned. If you’re going to do this, don’t get caught red handed. Not like panties.com did.

I mentioned panties.com’s contest in the Feb-1 both sides of the tracks podcast, “Jason Retires, Contests & Buffalo“. Their bonus was quite simple:

We are so confident you’ll make a sale that we’ll pay you $50 if you put one of our new panties.com banners on your website and do not make a sale by February 28th!

So I placed the banner, and emailed the program manager on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:44 PM. On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:59 PM, Lila (the program manager) got back to me. Checking the server access logs, there were 3 IP’s that accessed this page on that day: myself, my server, and 199.120.67.39 (Lila at panties.com)

199.120.67.39 - - [25/Jan/2010:16:52:55 -0500] "GET /panties-com-m910.php HTTP/1.1" 200 14201 "http://www.clubcouponcode.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Today I was thinking to myself that I didn’t make a sale (what a shame) and I need to contact her for my $50 bonus. So I logged into ShareASale, checked my stats (just to be sure) and imagine my surprise when I saw I made a sale! Yeah! A $48 sale means $7.20 for me!

What was strange, however, was the sale occurred at 02/28/2010 06:09:55 PM – just hours before the bonus period was ending. So again I turned to my trusty server access logs and found the following:

199.120.67.39 - - [28/Feb/2010:18:05:41 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 24842 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
199.120.67.39 - - [28/Feb/2010:18:06:01 -0500] "GET /panties-com-m910.php HTTP/1.1" 200 11364 "http://www.clubcouponcode.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
199.120.67.39 - - [28/Feb/2010:18:06:39 -0500] "GET /go/merchant.php?nMerchantID=910 HTTP/1.1" 200 955 "http://www.clubcouponcode.com/panties-com-m910.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Lila went right to my homepage, clicked on the merchant page, clicked on the link to set the cookie, and bought something nice for herself. She felt that it was cheaper for her to pay a $7.20 commission rather than a $50 bonus. But she failed to realize the implications of me tracking this down.

What a shallow thing to do. If you don’t want to pay a bonus, don’t put it out there. Instead, I feel tricked to have placed your banner on my site, and will make sure I spread the word how you ripped me off.

Anyone else participate in the panties.com February bonus program? Did you get your bonus, or did you end up making a sale on the last day, too?