Merchants playing at being affiliates

**Graham@Buyagift** · 06-12-04

Following on from the Christmas shopping experience thread, and the Empire Direct thread in October, I wanted to get your views on this.

Empire Direct have a prominent link on their homepage to PlanetValue which features a whole host of merchants. As I understand it, in the future they will be switching these links to affiliate links.

I have tried to educate them about this, and suggested this link wasn't shown on affiliate click-throughs, and they said they would leave it as it s and see what happens.

What move can be made to drum it into them?

(Merchants, I would refrain from supplying them with product feeds if asked...)

Graham

**renegade** · 06-12-04

Hi Graham,
The key point to ram home is most of the affiliates who are making an income from their sites are not daft enough to promote merchant sites which prominently feature affiliate links. They may get away with it for a while but once they've been outed on the forum most of us would dump them if they didn't change their minds PDQ.

In the case of Empire Direct I'd abandoned their program sometime last year following some adverse comments hereabouts.

**999gi** · 06-12-04

I dont have a problem with merchants putting advertising on their sites per se - its just another factor into the equation. Some merchants might remove the ads if an affiliate cookies was detected but only pay 4% commission and convert at 1%, whereas another may have the ads but pay 6% and convert at 1.2%.

At the end of the day it all comes down to EPC for me and putting these banners up will no doubt hurt a programs EPC, but it may still be a good program all things considered (although obviously not in Empire Directs case where pretty much everything stinks!)

**Dynamoo** · 06-12-04

I believe this is called "Cross Commerce". It's a way of filling gaps in a product range by becoming an affiliate of another merchant.

However, although there's nothing wrong with it per se, it does give me an uncomfortable feeling. I used to deal with the US merchant Alphacraze, which slowly just turned itself into a giant Amazon affiliate. EPC dropped through the floor and eventually they went titsup.

**Mogga** · 06-12-04

Sometimes when this is done badly it gives a bad impression.

There have also been merchants in the past who have done this to certain levels shortly before going bust so in terms of affiliate confidence then it might not be seen as a positive at all.

**Supercod** · 06-12-04

I always went with the rule of thumb, do what you like with your own traffic but your affiliate traffic should be used to sell the products on your site.

Technology is available to let merchants do this without upsetting their affiliates however what you often find is they don't do it if they can take the easy route.

The odd banner is one thing but loads of promotions to promote different merchants is another... guess you have to decided like 999gi says do you still make a profit from your traffic or not, if you do then no point in stopping but if you don't then should drop them and they soon find that the traffic they used to make their own affiliate sales stops coming for their own sites sales also and so in turn the whole thing falls like a pack of cards. That’s assuming affiliate traffic plays a big part in the income the site makes, if it's next to nothing then the merchant can rightly say well I don't care what they think and should post haste cancel the affiliate program

You know them high street popup some merchants have, I couldn’t care less if they wanted to show that to their own traffic however I do care very much if they show that to my affiliate traffic that I send them.. This sounds to me like it is the same thing, just different way of doing it.