Corporate Privacy: ReferralCandy
Fortunately for us, we have some very proactive clients when it comes to marketing their businesses (one of the reasons why they engaged us in the first place) over the years with us they learn the many different ways to acquire and convert customers. One such way is through affiliate or referral marketing. One of our clients came to us looking to use an online 3rd party referral marketing service for their site: ReferralCandy. Though reading the technical implementation requirements, we discovered some risks that we felt needed explaining before using their services (esp. as the company was not provided by a local company).
We're considering your service, but have noticed 2 things of concern:
1) through the use of the tracking code and the BCC on invoice emails, you are privy to a lot of personal data about our end-users and our business (like the total income of the business through online sales) - understandably this is very confidential information.
2) your website lacks any type of terms and conditions or privacy policy to give us the confidence that this very personal information will not be disclosed to third parties or used for any other reasons beyond the management of referral sales and conversions.
What are your polices around the collection, storage and use of this data?
Like in real-life, before providing confidential or personal details, you need to trust that the recipient is not going to take you for a ride. This is something that is often overlooked in this growing world of embedded scripts, third-party plugins and open APIs.
This is just one of the reasons why we enjoy continued work from all our great clients - we go beyond just web site development and actually put ourselves in our clients shoes to ensure the best for their business.
