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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    91

    Micfo affiliate commissions?

    I have always come to this board when a hosting company starts that downward spiral, but have not seen an issue yet for Micfo regarding their affiliate commissions. I have been hearing some grumblings among current customers that they have not been paid affiliate commissions that they have earned. Since I have had the same frustration, I wanted to see if anyone else has run into the same thing.

    First, I submitted a ticket via the members area like I normally do stating I had 2 referrals and included instructions on payment. I included all of the information like I have over the past year or so and was waiting on a reply. That ticket was submitted on June 7, 2006 and to this date nobody from Micfo has offered a response.

    Additionally, I had recommended Micfo to a friend of mine (vac123) who lives here in town. She signed up using the referral link I sent her so my account would get the credit for the referral. She forwarded me the information on the account since I was helping her upload the content to her new account. Again, on July 10th, 2006 I submitted an additional ticket and have yet to hear a response from Micfo.

    Next, I was reading a post on the Micfo board which stated that referral comissions received after December , 2005 would be $60.00 not $50.00. Yet, my affiliate tracker shows a commission in March of 2006 and lists the referral at $50.00. My friend signed up on June 6, 2006 and that information still has not registered with my affiliate tracker.

    So right now I am looking at at least $120.00 of referral commission that I am aware of, but have not received any reply from Micfo about this. I have tried the normal route that I have used over the past year or so and that has not worked. I tried searching the message board looking for a post about an updated procedure that I might have missed, which would possibly explain why my tickets were never replied to, but never found such a post.

    So trouble tickets do not work, so I turned to their message board. As of 08/01/06 nobody from Micfo has addressed my concerns. In my opinion, it should not take over a month to at least reply and/or acknowledge support requests like these. It is a not a critical issue in terms of my server being down but it is a program that Micfo offers to customers as a bonus for being a customer. Because of the good service I have recieved in the past by Micfo I have moved a reseller account here with several domains and have come to rely on the services. I have to admit though that this last incident has made me a little worrisome.

    I find it rather disturbing that it has been about 3 months and I still have no answer regarding the affiliate commissions that are due. After talking with other customers, they are in the same position.

    If Micfo has decided to discontinue paying for affiliate commissions, that is one thing. It is an entirely different story when there is zero communication and complete avoidance of the topic. If the program is discontinued, I am sure people will be upset. However, they will be more upset, and likely to take their business elsewhere, if the service is discontinued and never explained. All it takes is a representative from the company to clear this up. To me, this should be addressed, especially since they are still advertising the program on their site.

    "The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking"
    - H. R. Giger

  2. #2
    Sorry to hear that. Are you sure you met their minimum payout and provided all needed information? I have never had any trouble with any other affiliate programs such as Startlogic, Lunarpages and Bluehost. I would recommend these if you plan to use affiliate programs in the future. You can also sign up for programs through CJ. That is probably the safest thing to do.
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    New York City
    Posts
    7,406
    Hi,

    I would recommend strongly to keep trying to contact them to get your $120 then move elsewhere as it does seem like very troublesome to get your legit affiliate commissions. Have you tried to contact them directly through their 1800 number or PMing their team members on the forums maybe?

    If I was in your position I would do everything possible to get the owner's attention on this matter so it will get addressed.

    Take care
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    91
    Quote Originally Posted by Konrad4
    Sorry to hear that. Are you sure you met their minimum payout and provided all needed information?
    Yes. They will send a payment after $100 worth of commissions. In the past, all I had to do was submit a ticket to the support system (there is a drop-down to select Affiliate) and include which email address I wanted the PayPal payment sent to.

    There are others, according to the Micfo message board, who are experiencing the same issues.

    I am no detective, but this is not a good sign.

    "The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking"
    - H. R. Giger

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    EU - east side
    Posts
    21,920
    Yet, my affiliate tracker shows a commission in March of 2006 and lists the referral at $50.00.
    This looks like a thing that should be easily corrected.

    My friend signed up on June 6, 2006 and that information still has not registered with my affiliate tracker.
    Tracking software doesn't always work as expected.

    As of 08/01/06 nobody from Micfo has addressed my concerns. In my opinion, it should not take over a month to at least reply and/or acknowledge support requests like these.
    Now that is truly serious and definitely a reason for concern.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    91
    An update for those who prefer that type of thing... On the Micfo board we finally got a reply about the affiliate commissions.

    Affiliate payments would be cleared by the end of next month.

    We are making huge investment in starting Windows Hosting plans and VPS plans and multiple servers have been purchased for launch of this plans.

    Please keep patience till the end of next month.
    I logged into my members area and found that the two support tickets I opened in reference to affiliate commissions (one in June and the other in July) were both closed with no reply from the staff. I guess we will see what happens at the end of October.

    "The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking"
    - H. R. Giger

  7. #7
    They are using your money to subsidize other aspects of the business and call this "investing"? They are investing your money while possibly your own bills fall behind. If this is how they treat the sales force, how could anybody in good faith send them customers.
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  8. #8
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    EU - east side
    Posts
    21,920
    I must agree with Dave B. If the don't have the necessary funding, they should wait until they raise the money, not stop paying their affiliates. What they're doing is at the end of the day, a breach of contract.

  9. #9
    How can you do that to people that bring you customers ??? I'll never understand these business...

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    Richmond, VA
    Posts
    3,119
    This does sound pretty low to me - especially when they admit they've used affiliate payouts for other things. Sounds like a group of politicians running the place to me!
    Daniel B., CEO - Bezoka.com and Ungigs.com
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  11. #11
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    91
    Quote Originally Posted by ldcdc
    I must agree with Dave B. If the don't have the necessary funding, they should wait until they raise the money, not stop paying their affiliates. What they're doing is at the end of the day, a breach of contract.
    Especially since they still advertise affiliate commissions on their site.

    "The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking"
    - H. R. Giger

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
    Posts
    91
    For those keeping score, all of my affiliate commission trouble tickets were closed without any reply from the staff. Since their message board is filled with spam, and they say that they will not respond to trouble tickets there, I submitted another asking why my tickets were always being closed without a reply.

    The response I got was asking which tickets I had submitted. When I replied with those, the ticket was closed without any further reply. So I opened it back up and again asked for some type of answer.

    That is when I got a reply from a "new staff member" :

    I'm the new affiliate manager at Micfo and starting November 1st, 2006 things will be run differently within this department and you will see alot of improvements.

    If you could briefly explain your issue, I would be more than happy to address them for you.
    So I was beginning to get very impatient. I had already submitted several trouble tickets, made a forum post, and reopened a trouble ticket and they still needed some explanation. Here was my reply:

    I was hoping that someone here could help clear up an on-going issue I have with regards to the affiliate/referral program.

    First, I submitted a ticket (NYJ-61129) via the members area on June 21, 2006 like I normally do stating I had 2 referrals and included instructions on payment. I included all of the information like I have over the past year or so and was waiting on a reply. There was no reply to the ticket so I created another one (GID-88254) dated July 10, 2006. As of October 21, 2006 no staff member has replied to either ticket. At some point they were both closed by staff members with no explanations.

    Additionally, I had recommended Micfo to a friend of mine (vac123) who lives here in town. She signed up using the referral link I sent her so my account would get the credit for the referral. She forwarded me the information on the account since I was helping her upload the content to her new account (She was moving from HostMatix). Again, on July 10th, 2006 I submitted an additional ticket and have yet to hear a response from Micfo. Reference tickets GID-88254 and NYJ-61129.

    Next, I was reading this post (http://forum.micfo.com/showthread.php?t=2711), by Amir, on the Micfo board which stated that referral commissions received after December , 2005 would be $60.00 not $50.00. Yet, my affiliate tracker shows a commission in March of 2006 and lists the referral at $50.00. My friend signed up on June 6, 2006 and that information still has not registered with my affiliate tracker.

    So right now I am looking at $120.00 of referral commission that I am aware of, but have not received any reply from Micfo about this. I have tried the normal route that I have used over the past year or so and that has not worked. I tried searching the message board looking for a post about an updated procedure that I might have missed, which would possibly explain why my tickets were never replied to, but never found such a post.

    The only email communication I get involves the lifetime hosting promotions, which I want no part of. To be honest, that whole concept troubles me because it shows that the current servers are overloaded and that my affiliate commissions were used to help pay for upgraded servers:

    http://forum.micfo.com/showpost.php?p=17837&postcount=5

    “Affiliate payments would be cleared by the end of next month.

    We are making huge investment in starting Windows Hosting plans and VPS plans and multiple servers have been purchased for launch of this plans.

    Please keep patience till the end of next month.”

    Since the reply said to wait until the end of the month, meaning October, I re-opened a support ticket thinking that it would be easier for Micfo to track it since the others were closed and would most likely be overlooked. I opened ticket VJS-49499 on October 5, 2006. This ticket too has been mysteriously closed without any reply from the staff.

    Becoming even more upset, I opened ticket YFN-55965 on October 20, 2006 asking why these tickets are being closed with no explanation. This is the poorest excuse for customer service to behave in this manner. There should have been some type of explanation, no matter how minimal, before the tickets were closed. What Micfo has done up to date is say that they do not care about addressing customer questions and that they are advertising and using affiliate commissions to improve their oversold server load.

    With this latest ticket, I actually received a staff reply from Sam who wanted to know what trouble tickets I was referring to. I quickly listed the trouble tickets I was referring to and found that 3 days later, this new ticket was closed without any reply. I re-opened the ticket and asked for some type of answer, getting this:

    “Hello Jason,

    I'm the new affiliate manager at Micfo and starting November 1st, 2006 things will be run differently within this department and you will see alot of improvements.

    If you could briefly explain your issue, I would be more than happy to address them for you.

    Thank you.”

    So now, after waiting since June, I have to wait until sometime in November for improvements? The entire message board is being hammered with spam, support tickets regarding affiliate commissions are being closed with no answers, and other members who use Micfo are reporting the same with their accounts.

    I would like to know why I have to wait any longer for improvements when it is clear that those improvements need to happen right now? I would like to know why I have to wait until sometime in November when the affiliate commissions were said to be paid at the end of October?
    After that I received a reply from someone else at Micfo and on October 25th, the affiliate commission was paid.

    "The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking"
    - H. R. Giger

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    EU - east side
    Posts
    21,920
    After that I received a reply from someone else at Micfo and on October 25th, the affiliate commission was paid.
    Then things seem to be moving (albeit slowly) in the right direction. Good!

  14. #14
    Dubtastic,

    I suggest you use Commission Junction (www.cj.com) for any affiliate programs from now on. You will get paid for sure and no hassle.

  15. #15
    They've owed me over 1000 dollars in commissions dating back two years.

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