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Post Affiliate Pro
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Vendor: Quality Unit
Product: Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro is a fully functioned affiliate tracking script. It compares closely to idevaffiliate – some people say that idevaffiliate is a little easier to manage and has more “bling”, but Post Affiliate Pro is technically more adaptable (open source) and integrates with many ecommerce payment systems.
To submit your own rating for Post Affiliate Pro, click on the title of this entry and then use the comment form below. Thanks!
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Top 10 (#comments)
- Post Affiliate Pro (37)
- Diablo Media (9)
- Rapid Action Profits (2)
- Share Results Tracking (1)
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- PhpAffiliate (2)
37 Customer Reviews of “Post Affiliate Pro”
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Post Affiliate Pro Review by Mark Szekely, November 28, 2008 | Rate this Review:
Unfortunately, my own experience with this company who makes the Post Affiliate Pro software (QualityUnit.com) has been less than satisfactory.
The software was purchased on November 24, 2008. The company’s sales page indicated that a download link was to be provided immediately after purchase. However, I was never supplied with a download link.
Two e-mails were sent over the next two days, but neither received a response.
This morning, I posted an inquiry in Post Affiliate’s “Support Forum” asking somebody to look into this, and QualityUnit.com’s response was to ban my username!
QualityUnit.com does offer a “30 Day Money Back Guarantee” for Post Affiliate Pro. I’ve requested my refund, but am not holding my breath…
Post Affiliate Pro Review by EllllEON, January 14, 2009 | Rate this Review:
QualityUnit.com does offer a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee for Post Affiliate Pro rival iDevAffiliate does not offer any suitable one. QualityUnit’s Post Affiliate Pro seems manageable and great to use; although it is silly they charge currently $199 for intergration. They do not offer any other packgae like ad managing shame really.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Pissed at Post Affiliate Pro, January 23, 2009 | Rate this Review:
I have never felt moved to write a review of a software company prior to now. But those guys at Quality Unit rank on the bottom as far as customer service. I purchased post affiliate pro 3 back in October. It is now January and still haven’t been able to get it to work. Their service is terrible. They respond days and weeks later with criptic talk that doesn’t address your question.
I have offered to pay them to get it to work. They responded with they are too busy. I have hired a third party coder who has built and managed several affiliate programs and he couldn’t get it to work right.
I will loose my money for the software but it is a small price to pay for wasting another frustrating night trying to get that dismal software to work. Don’t waste your time with this software or this company.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, February 8, 2009 | Rate this Review:
I’m co-owner of Quality Unit and I want to react on posts I see here. Also by this post I want to show to Internet users, that we care about support and also about quality of our products !
It is hard to protect against posts as I see here, but I want to assure everyone, that we care about our customers and is not true, that we don’t answer their tickets !
We sell monthly few hundreds of licenses and we answer every ticket within 24 hours (during business days). In our support team is working daily 6 support agents answering tickets of our customers ! e.g. upon request we do also installations on customer server for free !
You can see also in our forum, that posts are answered periodically and we try to resolve every problem of our customer.
Also EVERY customer, which requested refund within 30 days after order was refunded without any questions !
Every visitor of this review can try to post email to our support to see reaction time of our support. This is only way I can prove, that we do our job as we promised!
Thank you for understanding.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, February 8, 2009 | Rate this Review:
I want to add more detailed explanation to negative post of Mark Szekely and prove, that we did all what we could for him.
Email with download information is sent to each customer right after order is processed by our payment processor – it is automatic process.
Mark had bad luck, because email was not possible to deliver to him. I reviewed our help desk system and I see e.g. following error message from mail server:
—————————————————
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
[email protected]
retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period
—————————————————
It is very hard to contact user, if his mail server is not receiving mails !
Also I reviewed all his tickets created in our help desk and all were answered on time – none of our answers he received, because all our mails were not delivered because of same problem with his mail server !
Also is not true, that we ban all our customers in forum ! We ban just posts, where are used bad words or spam.
He ordered Starter edition for $49 using Paypal. His order was placed on 24th Nov 2008 and refunded on 8th Dec 2008!
Second negative post I’m not able to explain, because there is no name in this post, so I can’t find in our system records about this customer … it is possible, that he had any similar problem with mail server and therefore reported bad experiences with us.
I hope this explains it.
I don’t want to look nice and force you to buy Post Affiliate Pro! I just want to show, that negative feedback here has 2 sides of true.
Everyone has to decide alone, which software will buy. From our side we will do maximum to keep our customers satisfied.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, February 9, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Hi,
because Peter Koning helped me to identify creator of first negative post with title “Post Affiliate Pro Review by Pissed at Post Affiliate Pro, January 23, 2009″, I would like to post also feedback to this post.
This customer ordered from us at the beginning PAP3 for price $99 as he mentioned on Sun Nov 23 20:44:33 2008
From time, when he become our customer he opened together 18 tickets in our help desk and every ticket is answered.
He is still our customer and e.g. on 6th February 2009 he ordered next services from us.
e.g. Latest ticket was opened by him last Friday 23:27:03 our time and answered today early morning (today is first Monday after Friday he opened ticket)
Those details I posted here to document our reaction time of our support (yes, during weekends we don’t do regular support, just during business days)
It is not true, that we respond to integration service order, that we are too busy ! Customer placed order of full integration service just on 6th February.
e.g. his latest problem is related to hosted Paypal buttons, which have bugs, more details is possible to read in our knowledgebase, where is also reply from Paypal support agent: http://support.qualityunit.com/knowledgebase/post-affiliate-pro/troubleshooting/paypal-hosted-buttons-integration.html
Post Affiliate Pro Review by X. Wu, February 16, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Definitely going with PAP 4 for sure, I liked the product before viewing Peter’s review site.
However, there are two business challenges if Quality Unit still wants to grow PAP, from Good to Great!
Price is too low! Lacking of financial power to invest in support infrastructure and product enhancement will be major problems to grow.
Lack of easily identifiable integration partner. Why should PAP 4 do the integration for free? Find great partners and bring strength of both to the market place and serve it better.
There are still a lot of room PAP 4 could improve on, such as Export to QuickBooks, etc.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Martin, February 17, 2009 | Rate this Review:
I’ve installed PAP for a client in Madrid and so far have no problems at all. I think the GUI is allright and friendly to use, has integrated many languages, and has a great price – value relationship.
There is plenty of support in the forums and for me as a developer was documented enough. Good product.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, March 27, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Hello,
I would like to react on entry written by X. Wu.
– Export to QuickBook is possible in latest versions of PAP4 – we allow customized exports – you can define many payout methods and for each you can define custom export format
– Support crew – our support crew is permanently growing – e.g. from January 2009 we have 4 new fulltime support members (together 6 support agents are working daily on tickets of customers) and we plan to employ new and new support agents as number of customers will grow. We try to do our best in this area.
– “Lack of easily identifiable integration partner.” – can you explain this ? Integration of each supported application is easily accessible from merchant panel in each installation.
– In last months we added some unique features, which no other affiliate script has (e.g. rebrandable PDFs)
– Pricing – I think we have price, which is well accepted by community of marketers – We don’t want to increase price of our software too much, because we think is better to sell hundreds of copies each month and not just few expensive licenses per month – but if you have any experiences or knowledges, which could help increase sales, let us know.
We try to implement every suggestion reported by our customers, so I would like to welcome everyone to post his suggestions in our forum or task database or send it by email to our support.
Also if you will have interesting suggestions how to speedup growing of our product, please let us know – we are open to listen to opinions of other users.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Mark Szekely, May 8, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Thank you Post Affiliate Pro for explaining your perspective on the ordering troubles that I experienced back in December.
Since the date of my original post, I confirm that I did indeed receive a full refund (I used PayPal’s dispute resolution process once I was unsuccessful contacting PAP by e-mail, telephone, or support forum).
While I would encourage PAP to provide customers with a broader range of company contact options in the future (e.g., a telephone number perhaps?), this issue does seem to stem entirely from a communication issue (and NOT from bad faith).
-Mark
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Steve, July 18, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Before we purchased post affiliate pro we looked at the comments made on this site and expressed our concerns the response was instant good in my book. We have since purchased the product with a few teathing problems however every email sent was responded to straight away. The staff were very helpfull to the extent they installed it on our sever for us.
Top marks from our point of things would highly recommend them and wish them all the best for the future. Steve
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, November 2, 2009 | Rate this Review:
In last weeks Quality Unit introduced also phone support operating between 9:00 – 16:00 GMT+1
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Ted Anderson, December 30, 2009 | Rate this Review:
Simply does not work and no one seems to care at this company. About 1/2 sales are being recorded. Server response time is inferior and does not track properly. Use another system.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, January 16, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hi Ted,
I asked our support crew to contact you and review your problems.
Maybe you have any problem in integration with your website or something similar if sales are not tracked. During our business day will contact you one of our team members.
thx.
Viktor
Post Affiliate Pro Review by James Fair, April 5, 2010 | Rate this Review:
I do not have a website and do not use the program for my own purpose, but this site that I am a affiliate for does, and I think the program is ok. Except for a few problems. On some days when I make a sale or when I get traffic to the website, none of my sales or clicks are recorded, therefore, I do not get paid for the sales I made, that is my only problem with this program
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, April 6, 2010 | Rate this Review:
@James Fair (post above) – I left this post on the blog here because it’s a relevant point:
– relevant as far as a subject for affiliates to consider when researching a tracking system
BUT
It’s totally inappropriate to claim that Post Affiliate Pro is dropping clicks or sales in the affiliate program you are promoting.
I personally promote over 15 merchants and many of them use Post Affiliate Pro. I’ve never had any concerns about dropped clicks or sales due to the software.
You should check:
– when you do a test click or buy are you doing it from a fresh computer with no cookies on it from the merchant and no previous affiliate link clicks from it?
– is the computer you’re testing from completely free of any spyware or malware, which could be stealing commissions?
– is the merchant running the latest version of the affiliate tracking system?
– have you approached the merchant or affiliate manager with your results and what was the response?
I am quite confident that whatever issues you’re having are NOT with the tracking system, or else they would have ALL their affiliates complaining and not promoting that merchant, which in the end will be the demise of their affiliate program. Most likely they are not installing/integrating the system correctly or they are skimming sales from you some other way.
But don’t assume it’s the tracking system, especially one that is tracking better (e.g. using flash cookies as backup) than most systems avaiable today.
Where’s the proof? Contact me with the merchant and I’ll test it for you for free, to prove that they are tracking ok OR that it’s not tracking and then we can take that to the Post Affiliate Pro guys to check out direct with their customer. I bet you a beer that the cause of the problem, if any, is not the tracking system.
Cheers.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, April 6, 2010 | Rate this Review:
For James Fair:
In case any merchant will have any problems with tracking, Quality Unit support team is ready to debug the problem and resolve all tracking issues.
From my experiences in 99% of cases the problem is in wrong integration or wrong setup of campaigns.
In each case on your place I would start with contacting of merchant, which operates PAP. Please suggest him, that in case he has problems to resolve tracking problems (if there are any), he can contact Quality Unit …. we will help him without any extra charges – support is free
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Dave, June 10, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Can anyone offer feedback on the hosted solution they offer? I’m reluctant to try to set this up on a web host’s server.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, June 10, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hi Dave – Thanks for posting on my site. I used it for a while for my Canadian mortgage lead partner program with no issues, and then we moved to our own installation
as we wanted to make some customizations.
It’s pretty low risk to try out the hosted version anyway so I recommend going that route as a first step.
regards,
Peter
http://www.Affiliate-Software-Review.com
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Dave, June 11, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Peter, thanks for the input; I plan to give them a try. Clicked through to them via your link above.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by kevin, June 11, 2010 | Rate this Review:
have not being able to get this software to work. need training videos in western English. tech staff does not answer questions clearly. did not get free installation as I had to pay a programmer to install ion cube. I understand the software has the capability to work and has the features I want yet the language barrier and the lack of understanding of my needs may be to large a hurdle to overcome. product needs to be more intuitive especially for potential affiliates. very frustrated
Post Affiliate Pro Review by kay, June 17, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Integration issues not addressed and not user friendly.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Michael Watson, July 11, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hello Peter
My wife ordered your review kit about a week ago and we have been tossing the PAP system around now for several months. Our biggest concerns really stem from the many post listed on this site. We have a programmer that built our site on a Magento platform and we have talked to them about installing the system into our site but we are afraid that it’s not user friendly and if they run into installation and configuration problems there will be little to now support from PAP to remedy any problems?
I just tried to call the (415) support line no answer nor did a recording answer to inform of support office hrs?
Also looking at the notes regarding the Magento install download app
Magento integration method was developed by 3rd party company (Priacta, Inc.) and users of Magento can download it from this url for free: http://www.priacta.com/code/magento-affiliate/magento-post-affiliate-pro.php
The most recent update supports coupon code discounts, per-product commissions, and lifetime referrals.
We don’t offer next support to this module and you should contact Priacta, Inc. directly if you need help with integration of Magento.
I am sorry but we are not sure we understand what this is saying. Meaning if we integrate PAP with our Magento site does this mean that we will have to go through Priacta in order to get any technical support?
We want to make sure that we understand everything as clearly as possible nor do we want to be persuaded by comments made on this board but as you can see it does raise some concerns.
Thank you in advance Michael
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Viktor Zeman, July 11, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hi Michael,
Support of Post Affiliate Pro you will get always from Quality Unit support team for free. We answer the phones and live chats only during business days. On 11th July was Sunday, when is our support team offline.
Magento plugin was developed by one of our partners and in case you will need to change anything in Magento connector, you will need to ask directly Priacta – but in case you don’t need anything special in your Magento shop, integration with Magento should work without any problems just by installing it into your Magento shop and configuring simple settings of this Magento plugin.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by John, November 8, 2010 | Rate this Review:
I have been using the hosted version of PAP4 for several months. I must say that I really love the software and the support received has been phenomenal. Any issues I’ve had have been taken care of graciously and with urgency.
I do have the random sale / referral that comes through under the wrong user or gets put under the default. This has seemed to be a matter of integration solved with a little trial and error.
It is a little frustrating trying to run an honest business when the software has problems, but overall if you are a decent business owner the problems are easily corrected.
The software is very versatile and you can customize it without limits as far as I can tell.
Thanks for a great product!
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, November 12, 2010 | Rate this Review:
I’ve been using Post Affiliate Pro for a few months now for the affiliate program of our mortgage lead business in Canada, and our programmer had no big issues integrating it with our system. We “tag” all leads with the affiliate so that when a lead sells, we generate the commission. This way the affiliates know that they will get paid even 6-12 months later when the lead sells. The API is easy to work with and handles refunds too.
The charting and easy setup for performance levels (eg. if leads sold > 20 then commission = 35%) makes managing our affiliates a snap. We’re seeing growth every month and our affiliates love PAP too.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Jake Sole, December 11, 2010 | Rate this Review:
I too have found the service for PAP absolutely terrible. If the owners/co-owners spend more time on actually resolving the problems and less time on trying to defend their incompetence on review sites such as this, there may be some progress made. I have spent the best part of the last two DAYS just trying to get this software working on my site. WHY THE HELL SHOULD IT TAKE THIS LONG AND STILL NO PROGRESS????
Communication channels are pathetic – the chatline is often unavailable and when it supposedly is, it takes 5 – 15 minutes; often longer for anyone to respond EACH TIME A QUESTION IS ASKED (hence my last TWO DAYS or absolutely wasted time). If I charge my time at $110 per hour, and I do, then how much has this cost me?
This is my suggestion: Review your approach because it is VERY user UNFRIENDLY, get some decent staff that can actually answer the questions and resolve the problems or simply give instructions that make sense and can be applied by a “Normal” person whom does not program computers for a living
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, December 13, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hi Jake – thanks for the feedback. I have reviewed your case with the management of Quality Unit, the vendor who develops and sell Post Affiliate Pro. Without going into great details and without publishing your chat/support ticket details for privacy protection, it’s pretty clear that they really tried to help you and in a timely manner. There is an onus of responsibility with each customer to provide as much detail in their questions as possible.
From what I read, your requests for support were extremely general and gave no information for them to identify (e.g. recreate the problem) the issue, diagnose, and help you with remedies.
Also, it sounds like you expected them to solve problems that were out of their control – e.g. expecting QU to somehow speed up internet DNS change propagation. If you are installing something mission critical such as an affiliate management system, do not expect this to happen overnight and do not expect that any vendor has some special way to speed up the internet for you.
As for chat response your post is highly exaggerated. The records show you had a response under 5 minutes, which is almost unheard of high quality response time, considering that once a chat is established the solution can be reached extremely quickly vs email or unweildy phone communication.
I am not saying your feedback is unwarranted, but based on what I’ve heard, I feel your expectations do not match the information you provided to QU to help you solve the problems and that QU did everything they could to help you in a timely manner with better support than most other vendors you may find.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Jake, December 13, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Thank you, Peter, for explaining this. Although the fact that this has been the greatest explanation given to date, suggests the service could improve dramatically, as you do not even work for the company receiving the payment, or perhaps you do? You are right in that this is a bias perspective as I have not experienced other vendors, yet if you say that this is better service than most, then this also suggests improvement is required by all vendors and the bar needs to be raised. You say my expectations are too high, yet is it too much to expect that a program can be organized which is user friendly? People in general are not computer programmers and do not necessarily know how to upload specific mySQL sequences etc into whatever place they are to go. Perhaps this is my ignorance of what is required, but vendors need to realize this is the general population. Perhaps vendors need to also consider connecting with customers website servers themselves and obtaining the information as it is a little like the blind leading the deaf when the customer has to do this; not knowing anything of what they are asking for, yet waiting for hours for someone to pick up the phone etc. This issue is really about the INTEGRITY of companies and corporations and their unwillingness to invest in support for their customers. Investment is great for marketing purposes; of course, because that brings in the money, but how much of a profit do we need at the expense of customer satisfaction? And this we have everywhere. Quality Unit have responded since and offered to help and compensate also, which is appreciated, yet I would hope people do not have to go to the lengths of writing a frustrated review on a website such as yours (the first time I have EVER been motivated to do such a thing), before getting the assistance they require. Thank you for your support.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, December 13, 2010 | Rate this Review:
Hi Jake,
I’m an affiliate for most of these companies but I don’t get paid to write posts. My challenge is to keep the reviews accurate and sometimes I do step in like this to clear things up, as it’s not so black and white in this business.
Btw believe it or not some affiliate s/w vendors don’t have affiliate programs, but that’s another story
It may be that you were under the impression that setting up an affiliate program was a matter of paying some money for s/w and pushing a few install/setup clicks.
This is pretty tricky technology and has to handle so many server o/s varieties etc. I doubt we’ll ever see a platform (unless hosted) that is going to work out of the box all the time. Even with chat, phone, and email support, if the expectations aren’t correct you’ll never be happy no matter how hard they try.
I strongly suggest anyone setting up an aff. management system have a programmer or the vendor install and set it up, to avoid any technical hassles.
I think the vendors may need to review their marketing material and checkout process to ensure that the expectations are properly set.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Bob, January 4, 2011 | Rate this Review:
I was intending to purchase PAP4, it seems to have the most adaptability and flexibility, and the Quality Unit (QU) website states PAP4 can run on windows servers.
I am hosting my domain on a windows server and running an application using asp.
I contacted QU customer support about one piece of code, for the integration of PAP4 with PayPal cart, that is written in php and do they have this code in asp (as you can’t run asp and php code in the same page). QU response from Michal Bebjak “To write similar code as our PHP code is a matter of couple minutes for skilled ASP developer. It is all just forwarding the IPN request to another script. I believe that this can be most quickly done by people who have done your IPN integration script. If they are not able to do it, we can develop that code but you will need to buy also Full Integration option.” So for PAP4 to work on a windows server running asp I either have to find a programmer to rewrite the code into asp or buy the PAP4 “Full Integration option” which I don’t even know what it is as it’s not listed in the QU website.
QU is somewhat misleading saying there product will run on any server – they should make it clear that you need to run php code which you can’t do if you are using asp or aspx. I don’t know why you would host your domain on a windows server and only run php? You wouldn’t. You use a windows server to run asp or aspx, which is not compatible with PAP4.
In these challenging economic times it is very disappointing to see this poor level of customer service, QU obviously do not want business, because if as Michael states it would only take a few minutes to write the code in asp why don’t they rewrite it and offer PAP4 to users running asp or aspx – this would increase QU’s potential customer base. I was intending to purchase a product from QU this has nothing to do with the company I purchased my asp application from. Could QU possibly also write java script to replace the php code?
My experiences have taught when changing an existing script / software package, get the original company who developed the product to do the work, they understand their product and are fully aware (or should be) of consequences of any changes made. It is quicker and easier for them to change their product rather than an outsider who does not know the finer details of the code.
I would not recommend PAP4 to users how are running on a windows server using asp or aspx.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, January 5, 2011 | Rate this Review:
Bob – thanks for the post but I must take issue with several of your points.
1 – in general you seem to be expecting a little too much of a software vendor. It happens quite often that merchants starting affiliate programs realize they need a platform or software, but don’t invest the little extra to make it actually work with their setup, let alone spend even more $ and time on recruiting and managing the affiliates. You seem to have fallen in this category. Let me remind you that starting an affiliate program doesn’t mean you go out and buy some affiliate software and expect money to pour in. This is a mission critical or at least sales critical venture and should be treated as such. So why don’t you get your webmaster or a freelance ASP programmer to make it all work? I checked with QU and based on the # enquiries they get for ASP integration there is not a sufficient market for them to invest time in this integration.
2 – you say there is no information about the full integration option. If you go here to their main PAP page and then click Services you will see the Full integration option link right there. I suggest you hire them to do it as it may seem to be a small task but it would probably cost you more to get someone else to do it, since they would spend time trying to learn the API and get their head around just what is PAP etc. Some vendors don’t even offer integration services, so be glad this is even an option for you.
3 – Re support of ASP. It is very clear from their requirements page that they support Windows servers as long as PHP5 is supported. You say “they should make it clear that you need to run php code” – did you not read their requirements page? It’s pretty clear they state this. It seems you didn’t research the requirements and total costs involved before hitting the “buy” button, and you’re blaming these surprise additional costs on the vendor. I will make a note to let QU know that they could set the expectations better re total costs to start an affiliate program, but that information is quite widely available already.
4 – The issue is that your challenge is integration due to you needing ASP. It is not a question of them trying to “to change their product rather than an outsider”. Their product doesn’t need changing. It’s you who needs to integrate it with your setup, which is quite unique and apparently not commonly requested. in the market.
5 – I can say that when I used PAP to setup a lead generation affiliate programme, we needed to integrate it with our site that runs ASP, and our programmer had no major issues with the integration. It was probably more complex than what you need, because we needed to hard code the referring affiliate with each lead, so that when the lead sold, the affiliate got the credit even if it is 6 months later. Sure it took some time and QU did support him in answering his questions. But now it all works fine and we are focusing on signing up more happy affiliates and money is starting to flow in, but not pouring yet
So you have 2 choices – hire someone who does integration with your ASP e-commerce product, or pay QU to integrate PAP to your ASP pages. Either way it should be considered part of your investment in starting an affiliate program.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Bob, January 5, 2011 | Rate this Review:
Hello Peter
I would like to reply to the comments you have made about my review of PAP4.
1. Surely as a customer I can have high expectations of any goods or service I procure? And also expect businesses to do that little bit extra to secure my sale and hard earned dollars.
Why are you going on about the amount of $ and time I am willing to put into my affiliate program, I have spent many hours looking and comparing different affiliate programs (even to the stage of actually setting up test affiliates users and sales campaigns / banners (on demo sites) and incorporating them into my site to test if they would work). At no time did I mention the amount of money I was willing to spent on affiliate software, this is not a relevant point.
What do you mean when you say “Let me remind you that starting an affiliate program doesn’t mean you go out and buy some affiliate software and expect money to pour in.” what relevance does that have to my issues with QU / PAP4?
2. It would be a lot clearer if QU displayed Full Integration information on their sales pages.
3. Of course I read the requirements page. It states “Post Affiliate Pro will run on any web hosting that supports PHP 5 and MySQL” and then goes on to list the versions they support.
In actual fact my server is running both php and mysql BUT PAP4 will not run with my application. The issue is you can’t run both php and asp in the same script / webpage. The above statement made by QU is misleading and actually not true.
No where does it say the PAP4 will not run on a site using asp, which in my case is true.
As I said if the code was java script there would be no issue, I don’t know if this is possible?
Can you explain to me why you would have a windows hosting account and just run php? You have a windows server to run asp or aspx, you can also run php in a windows environment. You can’t run php / asp on the same page, this is my issue.
4. If my needing to integrate PAP4 into my asp site and PAP4 / QU is unwilling to assist me in achieving this, well guess what…?
“The issue is that your challenge is integration due to you needing ASP. It is not a question of them trying to “to change their product rather than an outsider”. Their product doesn’t need changing. It’s you who needs to integrate it with your setup, which is quite unique and apparently not commonly requested. in the market.”
If that is the attitude of QU, they do not deserve my money. But as you state you do not work for QU (although you do defend them to the hilt and your reviews are becoming very biased), so perhaps QU should comment on the development of their product to work with asp?
If it only takes a few minutes to rewrite the code into asp, why doesn’t QU do it? As I said it would enhance their product and make it available to more people, which would lead to more sales.
Aren’t QU there for their customers? One of whom could be ME! If QU don’t listen to their customers (or for that matter potential customers) they will have none left, very soon.
5. It can’t be that uncommon for people to want to integrate PAP4 into asp sites (you state you have had to do it). Many of my competitors also use asp or aspx. There are also many asp affiliate software packages available in the market.
I have been caught out before making changes to other peoples / companies software. Some minor change / enhancement turns out to be a nightmare. As the developer of PAP4 QU knows their product inside out, they know the consequence of any changes made to their code, they also know what other changes (if any) have to be made after the initial change and so on.
If an ‘outsider’ makes changes I would have to spend many hours using the program to ensure it is working as it should – i.e. they have not made a mistake with the changes they have made. They have made all the changes needed.
Don’t get me wrong, PAP4 is one of the better affiliate software packages available. I don’t want to have all the associated issues of changing QU’s code, whereas if they developed their product to cater for the asp market (even if it is a small segment) I would be purchasing PAP4.
As I said earlier we are in very hard economic times, money is extremely tight for many consumers. I understand as a business owner that I have to cater to my customers, I am willing to value add to any service or product my consumers purchase, it is basic good business sense. My revenue is actually increasing, many of my competitors have ceased business or down-sized. This is an excellent time for businesses to expand and grow their business, you just have to think smart, advertise & develop your products & services and treat your customers as the lifeline of your business – go that extra mile.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Peter, January 5, 2011 | Rate this Review:
I did check with QU re the ASP market before making my post to you. They get very few requests for ASP help. But maybe you raise an opportunity here – they might many more requests (and business) if they fill in this gap.
I think we may be misunderstanding each other. I feel the issue is about some work that needs to be done to integrate the product with yours. It doesn’t mean changing their product at all.
Integration is a grey area since it’s the glue that holds two or more products together.
I’m not trying to defend to the hilt, but if I were in your shoes I’d consider either hiring QU to do the integration (maybe ask for some discount if you feel it is strategic re opening the market) or getting your programmer/webmaster to do it. Maybe first get an estimate from your programmer re effort required, and then pick the cheaper option.
I’ll suggest to them to update their requirements page, as I agree it could be more clear up front. This would reduce surprises.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Richard, July 27, 2011 | Rate this Review:
Hi Peter
I came across this review site today, doing some research. I ended up reading this whole comment thread and thought I should really leave my review.
I’d like to chip in for QU and PAP because I use PAP and QUs service has been great.
I’d also like to comment on Peter’s review site and his extremely knowledgable and very fair assessments to support each and every person’s posts. I’ve never come across such an excellent and valuable review site. Many review sites today are spammy junk with fake reviews just to make a sale.
Firstly it is only fair to say PAP is a superior piece of software. And it works well. That is a fact. It’s very comprehensive, mature code and very well supported.
It would also be fair to say that QU have a very high volume of support requests (which means they’re busy, which is a good thing) and getting attended to can take some time. (Hence the common complaint from people) Nevertheless, they do endeavour to look after you and work with you to complete your service requirement. We did have to wait some time till we could get our work seen to properly, but it was worth the wait, and as they clearly explained, they were inundated with support requests and they were experiencing some delays. So we were kept in the loop.
I know that with a script like this you can’t simply hire a bunch of extra people to fill the busy demand and put them on a support desk. They need to be trained up and completely understand the ins and outs of the script to be able to offer quality support. Some people who have commented negatively don’t seem to be very experienced with software or web development or else they’d have understood this. QU’s support technicians really understand what they’re doing and they have very intricate knowledge of the script. We worked with a very high level coder from QU’s support. We were most impressed.
I’ve had an “Ultimate” (Full integration) license for PAP since 2009. Back then I was looking for a highly versatile Affiliate management script that we could customise to the hilt to get it to integrate with a contact importer and work on a number of complex levels, and PAP was the ONLY script on the market that could handle our requirements.
Given what we wanted to achieve, QU delivered OUTSTANDING service in installing and customising the script to our requirements together with our Head Developer. I was so impressed with QU and how far they went out of their way to make sure we had what we needed, that I wrote a shining testimonial on their website.
For the work they did I’d have had to pay a developer 2-3 times the cost of the script to make it work the way we required. The price of the script together with the fact they provide complete installation and customisation built into the price made the purchase a no brainer.
I’m not a techie or a developer. In fact until we built this particular site we used PAP on, I’d never worked on a piece of software before. I’m an Art Director and I fell into web design as an evolution in my career journey. This project taught me an enormous amount about web and software development. It is with this understanding and respect for quality software developers that I am motivated to write this post. Why? Because QU are quality software developers and in my experience, they are not easy to come by. I guess one is right to be sceptical these days.
Nevertheless, the crux of my review is really a comment that I hope is helpful for your average joe website owner/ internet marketer who is not a techie and has no idea about software integration. In a nutshell if you expect to use software as sophisticated as PAP, you need to have a developer or technical team if you want to meet your high expectations to make it all work smoothly. It’s not all plug n play when it comes to software integration.
It is fair to add, as far as customer service, yes ok, QU can afford to improve their communications. But then again, what company doesn’t? I think Victor has already demonstrated his commitment in his earlier posts. Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement.
But I think it’s short sighted and selfish to expect a company to do a song and dance around your needs if you can’t back up your requirements with the same level of commitment. I’ve been a service provider in the Creative industry for over 17 years. And there’s a saying in our industry. The creative is as good as the brief. That is to say if your client brief isn’t thorough how can you expect the outcome of the job to address your needs?
Clients/customers always expect service providers and merchants to deliver over and above. Rightly so. Nevertheless the responsibility goes both ways. You give as good as you get.
Anyway, enough of my ranting. I hope this is of use to people who read this review.
PAP is great. I highly recommend it. QU’s service is excellent I highly recommend them. Just be sure to know what you need and have a good technical grasp of the requirement before you embark on this journey so you have realistic expectations.
All the best.
Post Affiliate Pro Review by Richard, July 27, 2011 | Rate this Review:
Oh yeah…
and one more paramount thing…
Patience is a virtue, as the saying goes.
And in software integration and web development patience is essential.
With that understanding great things can be achieved.
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