Merchants acting as competitors - promoting affiliates and cashback

Yesterday I discovered an email in my junk box from Purple Parking promoting a new(?) cashback site. Usually I just ignore spam, but in this case I'm very unhappy for two reasons:

1. I ALWAYS opt out of receiving promotional emails - so this email is 100% unsolicited.
2. More importantly, this email is obviously sent out by Purple Parking to all of their customers - some of which may have been referred through their affiliates. By promoting a cashback site, Purple Parking are biting the hands of the affiliates that have sent them many hundreds of valuable customers.

This situation opens a whole host of issues and implications regarding merchants promoting other companies, or subsidiarys, via affiliate links or even operating their own affiliate-funded sites. I know I would be unhappy to refer customers to one of our merchant partners only to find that when they get there they're going to end up being shown ads and being sent emails that promote other merchants and services at the detriment to my own affiliate income. I have real issues with the concept of cashback and its overally implications to the wider affiliate marketing arena, and as such won't be sending my users anywhere near a site that will then promote their own cashback brand and potentially steal my future referals.

If a merchant is benefitting from customers and referrals provided by affiliates then they should at least have the courtesy of NOT promoting their own affiliate links and ads for other companies within their sites.

I have posted a thread on the A4U forum, but have not, to date, received a response: Related Thread

Ethical Saving - a new stance for Price Devil

I'm repositioning Price Devil as a site that is standing up for all the good things about affiliate marketing. By doing this I'm making a promise that the site will operate within all the affiliate marketing rules and guidelines and will act in the best interests of the industry as a whole.

Here is the text I have posted on Price Devil:

Price Devil prides itself on a basis of 'ethical saving' - our definition of this is giving you, the consumer, the chance to save as much money as possible without unduly and adversly affecting other people. We provide factual information that has been provided to us specifically for promotion to you via the 'affiliate channel'. This includes basic prices, vouchers aimed at the affiliate market and offers promoted to us directly from our partners.

Unlike many other sites, we don't try to exploit loopholes, bend the rules and play an unfair game. Every company needs to make profits to survive and during the current economic climate we should all be doing our best to support the UK retailers who provide us with quality goods at decent prices. Every time a voucher code is misused, the merchant may end up paying out twice - significantly eroding or totally wiping out profits. If this continues many companies will struggle and find themselves without enough income to survive.

Every voucher code and offer listed on Price Devil is specifically targetted at our visitors. We won't try to make a quick profit out of other people's misfortune or work.

Using our links will, in most cases, earn us a small percentage of each sale. This money is used to pay our hosting fees and associated costs - as Price Devil grows we'll need to spend an increasing amount of money keeping it alive. We're not here to make a huge profit and at times will be forsaking our commission cut in order to provide you with bigger savings at no additional cost to the merchants involved. The more people that use our site and our links, the better the deals we'll be able to arrange.

Price Devil is leading the way in ethical affiliate marketing - we adhere closely to all affiliate guidelines and IAB rules to ensure that we provide the best service possible for our partners and our visitors. We'll use all the technology, contacts and friends at our disposal to find new ways of saving you all money without the need to bite the hands that feed us. We hope you'll approve of our stance and help us make a difference in an increasingly anarchic money-saving world.

http://www.pricedevil.co.uk/EthicalSaving