Q: How much were self-referrals actually costing us?
More than the obvious cases. We had a rule against affiliates buying through their own link for the discount-plus-commission combo, but enforcement was manual and spotty.
What we did to measure and fix it:
— Matched partner account emails and payment details against buyer records
— Found that about 6% of partner-attributed sales were self-purchases or close family, a mix of opportunism and outright abuse
— Built an automatic block: any sale where the buyer email or card fingerprint matched the partner's own gets flagged and the commission held for review
Result: we recovered roughly $8k a quarter in commissions that were really just self-discounting, and the auto-flag freed the manager from manual policing.
The caveat: some self-purchases are innocent (a partner genuinely buying to test the product). We don't auto-reject, we hold and review, so honest cases get released. A blanket ban with no human step generates angry partners and a few wrongful reversals.
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Program Desk
@ProgramDesk
Q: How much were self-referrals actually costing us?
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