Controlling risks and fraud in affiliate marketing: A simulation and testing environment

Affiliate marketing (AM) is a popular and cost-effective marketing model for e-commerce practitioners to drive visitor traffic, to their e-commerce sites. Nevertheless, this popular marketing model is associated with inherent risks and known frauds, which could have a detrimental effect on its popularisation. Many studies have been carried out to explore risks and frauds that are typically associated with cookie-based tracking models. This paper presents a fraud simulation and testing environment of a functional AM network, which can be used by AM practitioners and researchers alike, to test known fraud and risk scenarios through simulation as well as to discover new vulnerabilities. It can further assist in developing and testing effective solutions to mitigate those vulnerabilities, and to proactively control risks associated with AM.