I would like to second the recommendation for the referenced article by Patrick. Big kudos to patio11.
3 years back I had an issue go in my favor (for almost $2k) regarding a dispute with an auto body shop when I started asking them questions in a 'professional' manner (for documentation purposes) and questioning regarding their processes that they were following.
I used the article by Patrick as a template and and the auto body shop just folded on the case.
How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
51–60 of 270 posts
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-vi user, I feel very excluded :( ^H means backspace guys. And probably the same type of CEO that wants to make money by not paying out affiliates
Off-topic, but why map a function to a multi-key combination when it already has a key dedicated to it?
I don't remember what I was connecting to, but I've had telnet sessions that couldn't process backspace etc, so I had to use the ESC- mappings.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#53This piece has so many red flags. I'm surprised and somewhat disappointed it landed at #1 on HN. (1) Why was all of this work worth $88 in the first place? As a talented writer who is at least presumably familiar with software engineering, he surely could have earned that money faster by other means. (2) Why does he continue to work with merchants he himself describes as unscrupulous, in _affiliate marketing_? My hun…
Perhaps the poster is interested in additional income, outside the quite narrow range of the dispute?
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#54This piece has so many red flags. I'm surprised and somewhat disappointed it landed at #1 on HN. (1) Why was all of this work worth $88 in the first place? As a talented writer who is at least presumably familiar with software engineering, he surely could have earned that money faster by other means. (2) Why does he continue to work with merchants he himself describes as unscrupulous, in _affiliate marketing_? My hun…
Michael is a pretty frequent contributor to HN. In fact so much that his latest project is an ebook specifically about how to get on the front page of HN.
He has spent a few years building small one man startup type projects. His blog is quite obviously a way of generating initial interest in these projects.
He specifically notes that he has ended all relationship the affiliate so your baseless conspiracy theory is unnecessary.
Do better, clacsam.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#55This piece has so many red flags. I'm surprised and somewhat disappointed it landed at #1 on HN. (1) Why was all of this work worth $88 in the first place? As a talented writer who is at least presumably familiar with software engineering, he surely could have earned that money faster by other means. (2) Why does he continue to work with merchants he himself describes as unscrupulous, in _affiliate marketing_? My hun…
To (1): Justice.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#56Given how much time you've wasted with this, my feeling is that overall you still lost. They owe you money for the time spent as well. Good on you for publishing this, but you should have mentioned their company name in the title, so that hopefully it show up in search engine results and this alerts others to not collaborate with them.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#57> I had no evidence to prove any of my readers purchased something Well there goes your leverage. Is this common in the content game?
As they mentioned further down in the article, they later got access to data on how affiliate references were performing and used that to extrapolate over the 120 cases that were missing data.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#58> To put it bluntly, we are not paying you for your conversions How did the CEO write this and not immediately ^H^H^H it? Could he really not think of a better phrasing than "your conversions"?
As a non-vi user, I feel very excluded :( ^H means backspace guys. And probably the same type of CEO that wants to make money by not paying out affiliates
^H is the ASCII control character for backspace. It has nothing to do with vi, and everything to do with a terminal. It used to be common knowledge that when you press Backspace, sometimes ^H appears on your screen (if the program in question couldn't handle control characters natively). Naturally, in forum posts it started to have the meaning of "delete" for humorous purpose.
Its modern equivalent is HTML tag , which also means "delete" due to the common knowledge of its meaning. One doesn't have to be a front-end developer to understand , and one didn't have to be a vi user to understand ^H.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#59I understand the fact that the author took the matter in his own hands and claimed what he was owed but this article is just another proof that instead of doing our jobs and spending our time more productively, we always need to play the "lawyer" and the "detective" because some people/company always abuse their position of power. The author did manage to get his money, but at the same time pointed them a flaw (the affiliation page) in their little scheme, which means that he didn't help protect anyone else that wants to start an affiliation with them. And yes, I understand that this is "how the world works" but still, I always get bothered by this kind of behavior. Maybe an alternative maybe, would have been to stood up by just ending the partnership and finding another company that treats its affiliations with more respect AND post the article in order for others to read the bad experience he had.
Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
#60I've probably had 10 such cases in the last 5 years: speeding tickets from countries I have not even driven to, medical services double-billed to both my insurance and credit card, ... all $100-300 range.
I'm confident I could probably recover most, but at this amount, I just don't want to deal with it. It's one of those cases where I wish I had a personal assistant. It makes me think there's room for a "consumer debt collector" service with a revenue share model.