Over the course of the past few days David has built, tested and rolled out new functionality for handling inactive merchant links that result from merchants deactivating Affiliates, or leaving the AvantLink network altogether. Affiliates have always had the option of sorting to, and browsing “My Inactive Merchants”, but now there is an option on that page to “Configure inactive link handling” as well. From the configuration page for Inactive Merchant Link Handling:

When a merchant terminates their association with your affiliate account, or leaves the AvantLink.com network altogether, any affiliate links you have to that merchant will cease functioning. For large sites with many deep links to relevant content, it can be a time consuming operation to fully target a new merchant, and while this conversion is in progress your site visitors experience will be less than ideal. This page can help you control how those links behave while you update your site to advertise for other merchants…

By default, if Affiliates do not define specific actions for inactive merchant links, an error message like the following list of similar merchants will be displayed as a result of an inactive link.

You can also control the behavior of that click through message in the following other ways. Configuration options for handling inactive merchant links include:

• Show a listing of similar merchants (default click-through handling)
• Send traffic directly to an alternate merchant (when you use this click-handling option you’ll select which “Alternate/Replacement Merchant” and “Destination URL”)
• Send traffic to a custom page of my choosing (when you use this click-handling option you’ll select ”Destination URL”)

To control the click-through handling for any inactive merchant links in your account follow these simple steps:

1. Login to your Affiliate account and click “Merchants” from the main menu.
2. Sort Merchant Status to “My Inactive Merchants” and click “Get Merchants”.
3. At the right of each inactive record you’ll see a link “Configure inactive link handling”.

Look for help notes a long the way. Questions, comments, suggestions always appreciated.