Thesis Theme discount – some things to watch out for!

Becoming a Thesis theme affiliate seems like it would be a super way to make money once you have a lot of traffic, because the Thesis affiliate program is very generous, giving a 33% commission on all sales. Due to the generous commission, affiliates have a lot of leeway to give purchasers a discount – any portion of that 33% we want to give. There are a lot of affiliates who offer discounts on Thesis theme, and I would assume giving a discount helps us to sell a lot more Thesis licenses. Just to make sure I wouldn’t get into any trouble doing something like this, I emailed the DIYThemes Affiliate Program to make sure that giving a discount is not against any terms of service, and I was told that it is not. So that is great! We can give discounts on the Thesis theme and most likely sell more of it. But – there are a few things to look out for before you send a refund to someone who tells you they purchased Thesis from your link.

1. The first of course is just that the purchaser could have already clicked on someone else’s Thesis affiliate link before the day they clicked on yours and then told you that you now owe them a refund for the discount you promised. This is from the Thesis Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions:
When a visitor clicks through your affiliate link, a cookie is set in their browser that contains your affiliate ID. Also, their IP address is tracked in the database along with your affiliate ID. When this person decides to buy a membership or product from DIY Themes, the script will look for this cookie and try to match their IP address to identify the affiliate who will be awarded the commission. Visitors sent through your affiliate link may make a purchase later in time and the commission will still be awarded if the cookie is present in their browser and/or they are using the same IP address as the one logged in the database.
Now that is very sweet if someone clicked on my link then later just decides to buy Thesis from some other place, perhaps I’ll get a commission out of it! But to be safe when people want to consciously click on your affiliate link in the hopes of getting a refund of the discount from you, be sure to warn visitors to clear their browser cookies before clicking through from your site and ordering.

2. Another issue is that some sales don’t get captured in the affiliate system because a customer doesn’t redirect to the home page after a sale. The DIYThemes Affiliate Program has a back up system for this, but it is a manual one. So if someone tells you they bought from you and you are not seeing it in your affiliate control panel, you can email DIYThemes Affiliate Program and they will check on it for you. But until you see that sale recorded with credit to you, hold onto your wallet (or rather, your Paypal).

3. Currently the program pays out at the end of the month for the previous month. I was told that if you have a sale on July 30th, they will pay you on August 1st. But there is a 30 day refund policy for purchasers. So you could get paid and then have the money refunded if someone asks DIYThemes for a refund within 30 days. I don’t want that, so I intend to wait 30 days before sending discount money back to anyone. I have seen one site that will give refunds within 24 hours, but knowing about this 30 day refund policy, I am too afraid of getting bitten. I would assume we are giving these discount/refunds at our own risk, and I’d hate to try to collect my money back from a purchaser if someone gets a refund from DIYThemes and I lose my commission.

These are things I was made aware of while communicating with DIYThemes Affiliate Program. I still don’t have my site fully customized but am in the learning phase of all of this Thesis stuff. Do you know of any more “gotchas” to share with fellow bloggers?