When I first moved to Las Vegas, green right out of college, my first job was going door to door selling ADT security systems. At the time I needed a job in the worst way. If any of you have lived in Las Vegas for any given amount of time, then you know how tough it is to get the first real job. Well turns out that after 3 weeks of 16 hour days of walking neighborhoods, not all of them nice, I made my first sale, the commission, $200 before taxes. That was all I made and that introduced me to affiliate marketing, cuz my supposed team leader also made a commission. It also turns out the company, or ADT affiliate that I was working for, didn’t really exist and I never made that $200. Lesson learned. To this day I wonder if the person I sold the system to ever really got it. I kind of doubt it.

Fast forward 7 years and I have advanced my affiliate marketing to an expert level. So when we got a piece of mail today from ADT offering $600 worth of free equipment for former customers and customers who have moved, we instantly paid attention. Why? Well because only a few weeks ago one of the first things we set up in the house is our ADT system. However, we had only had it for a little over a year at our old residence and didn’t qualify for a free set up when we moved. Cost us a little over $200 to set up the new house.

The piece of mail we got today says even in the fine print if you have ADT for 6 months or more you qualify for a free set up when you move, or if you have turned off your system after at least 6 month you qualify. So of course we call, and the response we got displayed a great flaw in affiliate systems that are not control by the source of the product.

While ADT is responsible for the support and making sure a guard comes to your house if the alarm sounds, what they are not in control of are affiliate who depending on their level of advertising and what I guess would be their sales level can offer customers different packages.  When we called to enquire about getting our money back for being a loyal customer and simply moving, they said they couldn’t help us and although we qualify under the mail piece, since we went through a different affiliate they would need to call them and speak with them. They politely offered to do this for us, however not to speak about refunding our installation fees, but rather it see why some of our equipment from our first install was not included in our new install.

I will keep you posted on how much they are going to charge us to come set up our system with all the features included, or should I say what deal they can offer us.

Suggestion ADT, you have a great service with excellent response time, how about offering all your customers they same product and services? Don’t rob the people who pay for you to protect them and their families.