{"id":404,"date":"2007-07-25T23:59:18","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T15:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/what-happens-when-merchants-dont-play-by-affiliate-marketing-rules\/"},"modified":"2007-07-26T01:30:57","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T17:30:57","slug":"what-happens-when-merchants-dont-play-by-affiliate-marketing-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/what-happens-when-merchants-dont-play-by-affiliate-marketing-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happens When Merchants Don&#8217;t Play By Affiliate Marketing Rules?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As an affiliate marketer, I have to deal with challenges (or you might view them as opportunities) during the course of your campaigns, but when happens when you find out a merchant has been sticking it to you?<\/p>\n<p>A case in point, I&#8217;d be promoting web services for a merchant through their in-house affiliate program. It paid about <strong>$60<\/strong> per customer who signed up for their services.<\/p>\n<p>And I discovered a couple of days ago that they&#8217;re running the same offer on one of the biggest affiliate networks and paying out <strong>$90<\/strong> a customer.<\/p>\n<p>Boy, I was fuming.<\/p>\n<p>I can understand a $5-10 gap differential when the same offer is listed across various affiliate networks (the networks might be willing to cut out a chunk of their profits to give more to affiliates).<\/p>\n<p>But when there&#8217;s a near 50% commission payout gap I feel it unconscionable.<\/p>\n<p>There is an unspoken affiliate marketers&#8217; code of conduct, but there isn&#8217;t a formal regulatory body which presides over affiliate networks and merchants.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, who watches the watchmen?<\/p>\n<p>Some might say that in a capitalist society, you are welcome to vote with your feet.<\/p>\n<p>I tend to view business as a series of long term business relationships with real people.<\/p>\n<p>I can only guess that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The various marketing\/ad departments within the merchant or the network aren&#8217;t talking to each other, such that you have a 50% gap in affiliate payouts.<\/li>\n<li>The service provider faced some stiff competition and upped their payouts in real-time to remain competitive. But wouldn&#8217;t you be talking to your in-house team too?<\/li>\n<li>Affiliates? Who cares.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For the purpose of this post, I prefer not to name the merchant, nor the network, nor the type of service and focus on the core issue instead:<em> Trust<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So does that mean affiliates are going to<!--more--> have to set up a multitude of Google News Alerts to keep track of offers, in addition to promotions, competitive offers and depending on your traffic source &#8211; search rankings or PPC campaigns?<\/p>\n<p>Having to look behind my back one less time will certain help me focus more fully on what I want to do: affiliate marketing.<\/p>\n<p>Although I wasn&#8217;t bringing in a huge amount of volume to the merchant, I think my contribution was fairly decent.<\/p>\n<p>And now I have to decide if I&#8217;m going to bite the bullet and switch to the higher paying program, or choose some alternatives.<\/p>\n<p>I know a number of affiliate network people and affiliates visit this blog, so I&#8217;m curious to hear your feedback in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As an affiliate marketer, I have to deal with challenges (or you might view them as opportunities) during the course of your campaigns, but when happens when you find out a merchant has been sticking it to you? A case in point, I&#8217;d be promoting web services for a merchant through their in-house affiliate program. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[1769,285,843,842],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}