Market Health formerly Joe Bucks and HerbalBiz

Market Health at www.markethealth.com used to be known as Joe Bucks, still accessible at www.joebucks.com. They offer an affiliate program selling natural health products for a wide spectrum of concerns ranging from diet pills to erectile dysfunction cures. The affiliate payout is 50% which applies to online orders, phone, and mail orders. It also applies to re-orders which is rare in the world of affiliate marketing. The second tier payout is 5%. Affiliates who make 20 or more sales a month can negotiate their rate. The affiliate program is free to join; you can also sign up for a newbie affiliate program if you do not have a web site already or know how to create one. This option is provided by HerbalBiz at www.herbalbiz.com and costs either $1.95 or $49.95. The $1.95 option buys you a turnkey web site pre-loaded with Market Health products, marketing templates for flyers, business cards, and banners, and an e-book on internet marketing. The $49.95 option buys the same as well as a year of hosting and an 800# with customer support that can be used to take phone orders. This sounds like a great affiliate opportunity with easy start-up and awesome returns.

However, several complaints have emerged about affiliate ID hijacking. Many affiliates complained their affiliate ID was replaced with a common ID -- #680256. Market Health's FAQ section addresses this issue, indicating an affiliate cookie is placed on your computer upon visiting a Market Health or Joe Bucks web site. #680256 is the default affiliate ID (or Market Health's own ID). This is certainly a simple enough solution if your problem is as simple as seeing the wrong ID on your own browser. Many affiliates complained their ID was not persisting for customer sessions as well, though, and the default ID was replacing it. Complaints indicated this occurred most frequently on the most popular products.

  The director of Market Health is Gary McNelly. Gary regularly contributes on forums related to Market Health or Joe Bucks, answering questions and attempting to resolve issues, which I think is a mark in his favor, though his tone sometimes rings a little snide. Gary says the affiliate ID hijacking issue is a cookie problem. Affiliates say this is ridiculous as the problem persists across multiple browsers and computers. Personally, I think the blame should fall at the feet of Herbalbiz.com, responsible for providing the turnkey web sites the majority of these affiliates were using to sell Market Health products. This is probably a bug in the Herbalbiz.com sites where the default affiliate ID is not being updated properly for all products when the affiliate customizes the site. If anyone out there has a turnkey Herbalbiz.com site where this issue is suspected, send me the link! It would be my pleasure to track this issue further.

Market Health is a good affiliate program, but plagued with affiliate complaints due to the weak link in the chain - HerbalBiz. My recommendation is to set up your own site if you want to market Market Health products and avoid the turnkey sites provided by HerbalBiz.

UPDATE - I found an HerbalBiz turnkey affiliate site to check out. Basically, the issue is the implementation of the hidden affiliate ID, ironically meant to prevent affiliate ID hijacking. When you load the main store page, code on the site tries to set an aid cookie on the root domain for each advertised product on that main page. This happens when you click through to products not offered on the main page as well -- the store code attempts to write an aid cookie containing your affiliate ID on the product domain. Depending on the privacy settings on the browser, this may not be allowed. For instance, Safari browser's default settings do not allow sites to write cookies on third party domains. So none of these aid cookies will be written. In this case, the default aid (680256) is written upon direct navigation to the product site. This is a poor implementation that should be corrected to ensure affiliates receive credit for all their sales.