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Secure your promotions

Written by: Richard | July 2nd, 2010

I remember once reading a travel writer's reasoning behind saying that travelling around the globe, in this instance as a lone woman on a motorcycle, was not a scary undertaking because "the world is full of genuinely nice people who will go out of their way to help a stranger out of any situation or mishap". I do agree with this, I really do. I would just ammend the statement by adding the caveat: "Until they smell a bargain"

Having recently worked to operate a very generous random discount campaign for one of our clients I think I can say that all of our staff have been astounded by the dishonesty and weaselly behaviour on the part of their customers when faced with the possibility of receiving a higher discount that the already very generous baseline that all transactions were set to receive. This group of people tried every trick in the book, ranging from editing their cookie files to make the system believe that they had been given a higher discount to creating extra accounts and building the same order, not placing the order until they had the lucky stroke which meant that they had acheived the highest possible discount, in one instance this took over 30 attempts. This almost zombie-like fervour to acheive the higher discount led to an extraordinarily high abandonment rate of shopping baskets that had the lower rate of discount.

Understandably this reaction had been accounted for and as each new attempt came in to cheat the generosity of our client they were deflected as much as possible but even so it was quite a shock to see a group of obviously intelligent customers devolve into the virtual equivilent of a pack of hyenas. The take away from this does seem to be that when you run a campaign, for instance a small group of generous voucher codes you must be aware that they WILL be distributed across the internet and that people you feel have no right to use these offers will indeed get their hands on them and try to use them.

For this reason it makes sense to operate with extreme suspicion when creating your offers and to make sure that your ecommerce solution is capable of handling the attempts of the pack to break into it. Here are five tips to ensure that your site is "Bargain Hyena" proof:

1. Ensure you can exclude other offers, particular products or affiliate network traffic from receiving the offer. This will protect your profits, making sure people cannot apply to offers on the one transaction.
    
2. Ensure that any voucher codes you give out can be locked to one username or be a one use only voucher. Vouchers should always have a minimum and maximum order value for use.
    
3. Play your cards close to your chest, do not include any information about the offer in the cookies you leave on the customer's computer or even allow any voucher codes to be visible in the code of your website.
    
4. Monitor the offers constantly for any suspicious looking activity.
    
5. Monitor the money-svaing forums. These sites are great at what they do, offering advice on lowering energy bills, or protecting yourself from capital gains tax but they are also a gathering point for the kind of people who will try and cheat your generosity and if they find a way to get more than they should they will advertise the technique.