Too Much Media has announced several new additions to their back-end affiliate program software Next-generation Administration and Tracking System (NATS), including new fraud protection features.
Perhaps as a reaction to Shaw Internet's recent release of competitor Executive Stats, which SI billed as being the toughest program of its kind on fraud, NATS has added fraud reports that scan for strange member behavior and flags accounts via system-created fraud notes.
"Like all features in NATS we will continue to expand them as we receive feedback and suggestions from our clients," NATS partner John Albright told AVNOnline.com. "We feel there is always room for improvement in anything and we always have open ears to our clients in order to make our software and their programs better."
The fraud notes are based on a point system that fluctuates depending on the severity of the perceived fraudulent activity. Webmasters can review and dismiss the fraud notes if they so choose. Each member is assigned a fraud score, which is displayed by the NATS system.
In addition to improved fraud protection, Too Much has also made additions to the resellers admin, rewards admin, admin reports, mailer admin, site join pages, and member and management admin, with many of the new features coming as a result of interaction with clients.
"Without them and their thoughts our product would not be what it is today and would not continue to evolve," Albright said. "Unlike most affiliate program software products, our product was not built for one particular affiliate program and then released as a package afterwards. It was built from the ground up as a highly configurable system that can be molded to any program owner's needs and ideas. When we add any new features such as these we make sure they fit in with our basic concept of having everything being as configurable as possible."
A full in-depth list of new features, as described by NATS, is available below.
Resellers Admin
1) Added searches for:
- company
- pay to
- referrer (by username and loginID)
- sales rep
- raw hits (more than, less than)
- unique hits (more than, less than)
- Joins (more than, less than)
- Ratio (more than, less than)
2) Added new fields:
- last login date
- raw, unique, joins and ratio for last 1, 7, 14, 30, 90 days or all time
3) Users can now ban and delete resellers. Banning a reseller will automatically redirect all their traffic to /spam.html.
4) Users can enter a reason for banning a reseller. A template change of access.tpl is needed to display the reason on the page.
5) The resellers listing is now sortable by name, country, email, joined date, last login date, raws, uniques, joins and ratio.
Rewards Admin
A new rewards catalog has been added that lets users setup different rewards at different reward point prices in different categories. Affiliates can browse categories, pick a reward, if they have enough points for it, and are prompted to enter shipping information.
These requests are stored in the admin under unshipped rewards.
Admin Reports
Added admin reports:
1) The transaction report supplies a complete list of all biller transactions registered for the period/limitation selected. It also shows the member the transaction is for.
2) The fraud report gives an overview of the performance of all active resellers and the overall average. The following fields are listed and sortable:
- raw hit ratio (S:R)
- signup: unique hit ratio (S:U)
- qualified: raw sits (Q:R)
- total joins
- percentage of trials
- trial to full conversion percentage
- percentage of credits
- percentage of chargebacks
- average retention
- percentage of canceled members
- logins per membership-day
- average fraud score
All are calculated for the period specified (defaulting to the previous month).
Mailer Admin
The mailer admin now allows either text or HTML emails. The company is working on a dual version system where both types can be sent at once for the next NATS update.
Site Join Page
A hidden variable, rename_old_member, has been added to let people reuse usernames that are now expired or that never signed up. The variable signup [rename_old_member] can be added to the join form as a hidden field set to 1 to allow members to reuse old names. To make sure this does not interfere with cascading, usernames that did not signup will only be renamed if they are older than one day.
Member Management and Admin
There are two extensions in member management and admin. First, users can now create notes for any member to help with customer support. Second, is the addition of login tracking, which allows users to request a URL from inside the members' area to register a member login. This is best used so only one request to the URL is created for each time the member logs in. Every login is stored in the database and can be used for reseller fraud protection.
Fraud Protection
In addition to the new fraud reports, every time a signup occurs, and periodically throughout the week, NATS scans for strange member behavior or data and flags the things found via system-created Fraud Notes. Users can review each note and act on them respectively. Each note receives a number of points depending on severity. The more points a member has the more likely there is some kind of fraud. A fraud note can also be dismissed so that it is no longer displayed. NATS will also display the average fraud score per member in the Fraud Reports.
