If you aren't experienced / competent, and you try to outsource it, you're going to get taken. In this case it was marketing, but you could easily be talking ab

If you aren't experienced / competent, and you try to outsource it, you're going to get taken. In this case it was marketing, but you could easily be talking about outsourced development, buying a car, seeing a new dentist, etc. The proper way to introduce affiliate campaigns to your product / service is to succeed using paid advertising in-house. You need to establish your typical CTR, EPC, CPA, LTV, bounce rate, for different channels. Restrict the channels that affiliates use. Once you have your baseline, you can look at the numbers for each individual affiliate to determine their numbers stack up against your baseline. There are a lot more details that can't fit into an HN comment made on my way to work heh. One concrete example, so it's more tangible. If you don't explicitly restrict pop up traffic, affiliates can pop and drop their cookie when someone with adware installed visits your domain. Edit: This story is very one sided. Sure the marketing consultant was probably sleazy, and the affiliate marketing tricks were unethical, but the op did not even do basic due diligence. If I were the op, I would at least look at how the affiliate marketing programs of other mature ecommerce sites were set up. Amazon for instance has an affiliate fee of 4% on electronics. Paying 10% instead of 4% as affiliate fees is a red flag. Amazon payouts are made 60 days after the marketing period, where they can conduct their fraud analysis. Also you should be paying very close attention to their operating agreement which outline what does and does not earn you an affiliate fee.