Network merchant approvals
July 6th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger Posted in Affiliate management, All articles | No Comments »
One of the pains of being an affiliate especially a part time affiliate like me, is the sheer number of merchants, terms and conditions, voucher codes and all sorts of other restrictions put in place by merchants who, may or may not understand affiliate marketing. Networks typically take a back seat for most small affiliates when it comes to allowing affiliates to sign up to a campaign, which is fair enough, typically the network will rely on the merchant to approve their affiliates and the merchant can take a few weeks to go through, and even then as an affiliate you might not get approved, for what ever reason.
I’ve been using skimlinks, a tool designed as an amalgamation tool for affiliates and whilst its great, it doesn’t have a datafeed feature which as an affiliate i find invaluable, the great thing about skimlinks however, is that their approval process, whilst strict means that once accepted I can promote what ever merchant I like so long as I include a little snippet of code on the site, you might argue that tradedoubler have something similar but the difference is, with skimlinks I can start a site in this way rather than fussing with the code of an already setup site.
I think that if networks were more strict about what affiliates they took onboard and if there was a universal terms and conditions that applied to all merchant it would make life a hell of alot easier for true content affiliates such as myself.
I agree that there might be issues with merchant who have particuar requirements and it’s not a one size fits all solution, but time is money and networks should support affiliates by providing a quick and efficent sign up process, Affiliate Future and Webgains are better at this than most. I think networks could take a page out of skimlinks in terms of managing affiliates and helping to support affiliate.
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