Have Affiliate Window lost the plot?

I was REALLY excited to read Affiliate Window’s blog today about “UK’s First Dynamic Search Widget Available Through Affiliate Window“.

I accepted the tems and conditions (you also agree to give up 25% of commission to PrismaStar in relation to any sales made via the new widget.

I added a scathing response to the AW Blog entry, but it has yet to see the light of day. Affiliate Window doesn’t usually censor comment and I expect that it will appear in due course, but it isn’t there yet.

Personally, I cannot believe that the tool was actually trialled by an affiliate. I didn’t provide all feedback in my blog comments to Affiliate Window, but here it is in all its vomit inducing glory :

1. It is not search engine friendly … all the products are delivered via Javascript
2. It is merchant specific .. i.e. no price comparison across merchants
3. It has very broad product categories … no granularity whatsoever
4. Very limited AW merchants featured
5. associated with point 3-4 … no filtering for Affiliate by keyword
6. No visitor search functionality
7. VERY slow to load .. i expect visitors to use the back button

As a real example of uselessness, one of the few categories set up presently is TVs. There is an enormous range of features preconfigured to help a visitor drill down to determine whether a particular subset of TVs meet their buying criteria …. with one notable exception …. the screen size.

As a concept, I actually think it is a good one but the execution so far is absolutely useless in my opinion. I wouldn’t risk any revenue share on this at the moment as I actually think that it will have a negative rather than positive effect on sales.

For this tool to have take-up it really ought to work cross-merchant or even cross-network as Easy Content Units has done. It also needs to make sure that there is sufficient granularity for the affiliate to have the widget tie in specifically rather than broadly to the content.

Affiliate Window and PrismaStar really have to do better in my view.