Postmortem: iTunes Affiliate for Apps
Yesterday, six months later, I finally got paid the remaining balance owed to me as an iTunes Affiliate. Getting paid was an ordeal that took many emails from me to the iTunes Affiliate Program.
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I had balances in at least 20 forms of currency. The payments to me are all converted to US dollars, but their payment system is organized by currency, and each currency has a minimum payment threshold. If I recall correctly, the payment threshold was $30, so if your balance in one currency is less than the threshold, you don’t get paid from that balance, and the iTunes Affiliate Program just hoards your money until you reach the threshold.
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Be persistent. Mention the $50 manual adjustment. If all else fails, threaten a lawsuit. They’ll want to close your account, but don’t let them close it until after you’ve been paid in full.
I’ve been going back and forth with them for months but didn’t threaten a lawsuit, and they haven’t paid me yet.
Previously:
- Apple Removes Apps From Their Affiliate Program
- Apple Cuts App and IAP Affiliate Commissions
- Apple App Store Affiliate Payments
- New iTunes Affiliate Program
5 Comments RSS · Twitter
@Michel It’s impossible to audit, anyway, because we don’t know how many purchases we actually got, but I, too, could never match anything up. It doesn’t seem like I got the right number of payments or the proper total amount (even aside from the many sub-£2 ones).
Wait, how much money do you think Apple will net out of not paying out fully? I only ask because cynical me sees people's lives ruined over stealing $100 or less and it seems like companies get to accidentally mess out payouts all the time (or charges for that matter). Very frustrating.
Stupid question: shouldn't there be a class action to resolve this?
This new extra-greedy Apple really sucks.
For the first time in 15 years I’m thinking about moving to other platforms and 100% abandon Apple.
It took some time, but I asked about closing my account back in November and I got paid in February. I didn't have to argue about anything. Some balances were remaining in their web console, so I asked about it and was told about this £2 threshold. That said...
I tried to match each balance with a payment in my bank account, but couldn't be sure about how to match some of them given that on my end I see them already converted in CAD. Fun findings:
• I got many "too small" payments for that £2 threshold: the smallest being $1,79 CAD (about £1.07).
• I think I got "too much", meaning that the total amount received was one or two dollars above what I expected. Perhaps they manually sent an equivalent sum for the remaining balances but weren't able to update them in the web console, and for some reason the support rep wasn't aware of this. Or maybe the exchange rate was more favorable than I expected (I used the exchange rate at the time the payment reached my bank account).
In the end I didn't fight about the remaining balances and let them close it. At worse I lost $2, but I can't really know.