Hi Geekzoners

Firstly, sorry for the wall of text.

I own an online computer store here in NZ and have been a featured store with PriceSpy since featured stores were a thing.

Midway through last year I noticed some unusually high spikes in registered click-throughs to our website from PriceSpys admin panel where you can check your stats etc. Odd things like 100 clicks at 4am in the morning when the average was 1. Or 1200 clicks for a whole day when the average was between 200-300. And yes, we were also invoiced for them. It wasnt just with us. We are aware of this happening with other NZ featured stores too.
Anyway, I raised my concerns with PriceSpy and after a week or 2 they responded and mentioned they had fixed the problem. We received a new invoice with what appeared to be the correct number of click throughs.

We run several analytics apps on our webserver that record things like referral URLs, Hosts, Types etc etc. We can see exactly when we get a referral from a newsletter campaign, a facebook ad, GeekZone, PriceMe and PriceSpy etc etc. Anyone familiar with Google Analytics, Woopra etc will know how much stats and info you can gather. So, with these tools I decided to check back over a few months of data and noticed an interesting trend. The click throughs from PriceSpy are approx 20% more than what we are seeing from our own analytics software. I mentioned this to them, and they asked for some breakdowns which I provided. This was mid-November 2016. Heard nothing after 6 weeks so decided to follow-up. They replied that they had assumed their support person had contacted us which they hadnt. Anyway, last week I decided to check through Januarys click throughs on PriceSpy using our analytics app. Weird, no traffic at all from PriceSpy. But their website says otherwise - normal amounts of traffic. I keep checking and to my dismay, discover that on the 17th January all traffic from PriceSpy stopped. They have in same way masked their referrals so we can no longer monitor them. They now show up as 'no referrer' in our stats.

To me this is no coincidence considering the timing of my emails. It seems they do not want us having the ability to monitor their referrals. Now we have to believe their system with no way of checking them against our own analytics.

Dodgy much!?

This is akin to the power companies taking away our power meters so we have no way to check how much power we are using.

I cant actually see why PriceSpy would want to do this other than to cover up any indescrepencies.

Can they even legally do this?

TLDR
If you run a featured store on PriceSpy, double-check you are indeed getting the referral traffic you are paying for!