Social Snowball offers several features to help protect your affiliate program from fraud:
Blocking Commissions on Self-Referrals
Social Snowball allows you to block any commissions arising from self-referral orders. This key feature ensures that you don't pay commissions to affiliates for any self-referral orders by checking if the referral customer shares the same email or IP address as the affiliate. [Learn more here.]
Commission Maturation Periods
Social Snowball's commission filter feature lets you set a maturation period for a payout after a referral transaction occurs. During the duration of the maturation period, you won't be able to send the payout, and its status will be "pending". As soon as the maturation period ends, the payout will be marked as "ready" and will be ready to be sent.
The most popular use case of this feature is creating a maturation period equivalent to your brand's return policy so that any payouts associated with returned/canceled orders will be canceled automatically before you send any commission for that referral. [Learn more here.]
Ban Affiliate Accounts
If you suspect an affiliate of fraudulent activity, you can ban their account. To do this, go to the Affiliates tab, select the affiliate’s name, and click Ban. Banned affiliates cannot rejoin your program. [More details here.]
Safelinks
Safelinks is a revolutionary affiliate link brought to you by Social Snowball. These UTM links generate unique, single-use coupon codes for each customer when they click on the link and land on your store. This allows your affiliates to offer discounts while preventing coupon code leaks. [More details here.]
Paid Search Fraud Protection
Our advanced fraud detection and blocking system is designed to protect your affiliate program by identifying and preventing fraudulent referrals. By detecting suspicious activity—such as affiliates bidding on your brand keywords via search engines—and blocking unauthorized commissions, this feature helps ensure the integrity of your affiliate program. [More information here.]
Sign-Up Form Bot Prevention
We use Google ReCAPTCHA Enterprise to prevent bot sign-ups while maintaining a seamless applicant experience without requiring users to complete manual CAPTCHA challenges. When suspicious or bot-like activity is detected, the user is shown a fake success screen along with a non-functional code.
To confirm that ReCAPTCHA Enterprise is active on your sign-up form, make sure you can see the ReCAPTCHA badge in the bottom-right corner of the page. If not visible, you would need to recreate your sign-up form.
Manual Approval Sign-Up Form
If you see or suspect fraudulent affiliates joining your affiliate programs, you can switch your sign-up forms to 'manual approval' instead of 'auto-approval'. Manual approval sign-up forms will ask the affiliates to submit an application, which you can approve/deny based on their responses.
