How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

A few years ago, I learned a handy technique for resolving disputes with uncooperative businesses. It’s simple to understand and easy to implement. You don’t need lawyers or a prominent social media presence. All it requires is for you to behave like an organized professional. This technique recently resolved a problem so effectively that I had to share the story.

The conversation began with a merchant telling me in no uncertain terms that they refused to pay the money they owed me:

Two email exchanges later, we landed here:

This post explains the dispute and how The Organized Professional Method solved my problem.

In 2017, Patrick McKenzie wrote a blog post called “Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You." It’s ostensibly about disputing information on your credit report, but the article is more generalizable than Patrick perhaps intended. It was an illuminating read for me in demonstrating how much power you can wield by thinking strategically about an organization’s incentives.

In Patrick’s article, he explains that banks reward their customer service agents for getting customers off the phone as quickly as possible. They reward their compliance team for minimizing the bank’s number of regulatory incidents per year. Therefore, Patrick taught his readers how to navigate from a bank’s customer service department to their legal department. From there, the customer presents themselves as knowledgeable enough of their rights that the compliance team should rightly fear a regulatory incident.

This strategy applies to businesses more generally. If a company mistreats you, usually someone at the organization has the power to correct it. The potential problem solver follows self-serving incentives, as anyone does. If you can identify those incentives and demonstrate an ability to affect them, then the person is likely to take your problem seriously.

The biggest takeaway for me was Patrick’s recommendations on the tone to maintain throughout the dispute:

Patrick’s recommendation resonated with me because I generally don’t see value in yelling at people, but I also don’t want to take shady business practices lying down.

For the past two years, I’ve run a site called Is It Keto that helps beginners navigate the keto diet.

Is It Keto is a site I created in 2018 to help beginners learn about the keto diet.

The site has grown steadily over time, to the point where it now has over 100,000 pageviews per month. Those numbers are high enough to attract direct partnerships with other keto companies.

In June, I joined the affiliate program for a company called Kiss My Keto. They sell keto-friendly bread and a few other keto foods. The affiliate deal meant that I’d advertise their products on Is It Keto. If any Is It Keto readers clicked a Kiss My Keto link and made a purchase, Kiss My Keto would give me a 20% commission.

Kiss My Keto’s affiliate program sounded like a good deal, but I would later come to realize it was not what it seemed.

Eager to see my earnings skyrocket, I checked my affiliate stats the day after I began advertising Kiss My Keto. Seven visitors had clicked links to Kiss My Keto, but I still had zero “conversions,” meaning that none of the visitors I referred had purchased anything. Okay, fine. Maybe prices were higher than they expected, or none of those seven felt like buying anything that day.

After a week, it was the same thing. 26 users had visited, but none of them purchased anything.

Kiss My Keto’s stats claimed that I had sent them 95 visitors, all of whom supposedly left without making a purchase.

By the one month mark, I became suspicious. 95 readers from Is It Keto had visited Kiss My Keto, and the affiliate stats still claimed I had earned zero commissions.

For context, I had a similar affiliate deal with Amazon, and 17% of Is It Keto readers made a purchase after clicking an Amazon link in the same period.

Baffled by these stats, I reached out to Nini Perez, Kiss My Keto’s affiliate manager.

Note: I’ve edited these emails for brevity, but the unabridged email thread is available for anyone who wants to see the full discussion.

At first, she told me that maybe my customers just click the links out of curiosity:

She also said something confusing:

Not qualified for a discount? Why should that matter?

After a few back and forths, I finally got a straight answer that explained my missing commissions:

Kiss My Keto’s affiliate manager reveals that they exclude certain purchases from commissions.

This was a shocking revelation for a few reasons.

First, Kiss My Keto’s published policies say explicitly that their commissions apply to all products and make no mention of exceptions. Or at least they did at the time. They removed that page sometime in the last month, but I archived a copy.

Kiss My Keto’s published rates claimed a 20% commission on all products with no mention of exceptions.

Secondly, bread is Kiss My Keto’s flagship product. If you visit their website, they showcase bread so prominently that you’d think they’re a bread store. A hidden exception for bread would be like if Zappos advertised a commission on all their products and then later said, “Oh, but we didn’t mean shoes.”

Kiss My Keto’s homepage features bread prominently.

And that’s not even getting into the “sale event” part of Nini’s email. Days earlier, Kiss My Keto sent their affiliates an email encouraging them to “boost [their] earnings” by sharing Kiss My Keto’s sitewide 4th of July discount codes.

Kiss My Keto encouraged affiliates to share coupon codes but later told me that this disqualified them from earning commissions

According to Nini, Kiss My Keto withheld commissions on any transaction that used that coupon, even if the customer purchased through an affiliate link. Even outside of special sales, when you visit Kiss My Keto, their site bombards you with offers for different discounts:

Within seconds of visiting the site, Kiss My Keto offers new discounts to compete with their own affiliate partners.

Based on what Nini said, these special offers compete against the affiliate’s referral credit. If the customer chooses a new discount, Kiss My Keto pays zilch to the affiliate who brought the customer to the site in the first place.

To me, the discrepancy between Kiss My Keto’s published rates and their actual payouts seemed misleading and maybe even constituted fraud. Nini offered to compensate me instead with Kiss My Keto products, “so [I] can create a new article and let’s see how it goes.” But that was clearly not our agreement. It was time to employ The Organized Professional Method.

I sent the following email to Alex Bird, Kiss My Keto’s CEO and co-founder:

I’m doing a few things in the email to adhere to The Organized Professional Method:

After two weeks, Alex still hadn’t responded, so I sent him this follow-up:

Things to notice:

The next day, I received a response from Michael Herscu, Alex’s co-founder:

There are a few things that are confusing about Herscu’s email that I need to unpack.

He says, “we have already paid you.” Unbeknownst to me, Kiss My Keto had spontaneously begun paying me commissions on bread purchases (more on that below). The day before Herscu responded to me, I received a PayPal payment for $26.60 for commissions I earned over the preceding two weeks.

Herscu also seems to misunderstand the real issue. He was acting as though it was a simple matter of distrusting Kiss My Keto’s numbers. Though I was indeed skeptical of their numbers, I didn’t want to fight that battle because I had no evidence to prove any of my readers purchased something. What I could prove was that Kiss My Keto’s advertised pay structure differed from what their affiliate manager described to me privately.

I responded a few hours later:

I intentionally steered the conversation away from stats, as I had no way to prove anything about Kiss My Keto’s internal sales numbers, however dubious they might seem. By posing the question of published policies, I forced the conversation to a place where we share access to the same information.

Herscu responded half an hour later, this time in a less hostile tone:

That was a good sign. He asked what he can do to make me stop bothering him, so he appeared amenable to a solution.

I sent this response:

He responded a few days later, agreeing to pay me the $88:

You may have noticed a logical inconsistency in my demand to Kiss My Keto. My original issue was that Kiss My Keto’s statistics seemed untrustworthy, so why was I suddenly treating everything after July 16th as reliable?

Something changed on July 16th that was very much in my favor. Suddenly, Kiss My Keto started crediting me for sales of bread, the thing they privately had claimed was ineligible for commission. Interestingly, my first commission occurred less than 24 hours after I emailed their CEO, Alex Bird:

That was great news for me because it gave me hard numbers to extrapolate my missing sales. When I had zero commissions, Kiss My Keto could simply claim that none of the customers who came from my site completed purchases. Without access to their internal receipts, I’d have no evidence to argue. By flipping on commissions for bread, they gave me a view into what my commissions should have looked like the entire time.

Since the email exchange, I’ve collected more data, and now their accounting prior to July 16th seems even more suspect:

Note: Fewer Is It Keto readers clicked these links in the second half because I stopped featuring Kiss My Keto as prominently on my site. I’ve since removed all mention of Kiss My Keto, as I no longer have any interest in helping them earn money, regardless of what they pay me.

Did Kiss My Keto pay me because I convinced them that it was the ethical and just thing to do? Probably not.

To me, it looks like Kiss My Keto was violating their published policies, I had clear evidence of it, and $88 seemed like a cheap price to placate me. After my email to the CEO, they took down their affiliate policy page, and I started receiving commissions when customers I referred purchased bread.

Even if Kiss My Keto thought my assertions were baseless and paid me $88 just to get me to buzz off, that’s still a win. Had I huffed and puffed and told them how mad I was, they would have simply stopped responding. Herscu started at, “to put it blatantly, we’re not paying you.” Two emails later, I brought him to, “$88 seems fair to me.” Even if all I did was convince him that $88 was cheaper than dealing with whatever nuisance I might cause, The Organized Professional Method created that impression.

I use this method frequently. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I always find it to be the least stressful way of addressing disputes. When a company engages in bad behavior, I think about these questions:

Over the past three years, I've written 17 posts that reached the front page of Hacker News, with five of them reaching the #1 spot. Over the same period, many of my posts absolutely flopped and went nowhere.

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