0% Commissions - H0% H0% H0% Merry Christmas (Not!)

[Qui Gon Jinn]

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Should products you receive 0% (zero) commission on be permitted into a product feed which you use on your site(s) & for which you as an affiliate don't receive commissions on.

Any additional comments appreciated.

Please note atm public voters not showing, but will do later, so please note it's not anonymous.

You can view how forum member have voted here

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/a...duct-feed.html

[drivetowin]

I think there should be a third option - Yes - if they are clearly identified within the feed as being non-commissionable items

At the moment I feel unable to vote in the poll as I don't agree with No but I can't give an unconditional Yes either.

[hpops]

Interested to hear any possible reason why they should - I accept that there are merchants who will not pay commission on certain products (although frankly, I accept that pretty reluctantly) but I can see no reason why they should then gain promotion through a cpa channel of those items in any way. Doubt you'll get many yes votes here mate, private or otherwise ;-)

Keith - particularly interested to hear why you would want these?

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Keith,

And by that same token you are opening Pandora's box, for other merchants to introduce 0% commissions on what products they feel like, devaluing the affiliate marketing channel and the whole affiliate industry in the process.

Next someone will say that is what is required for the industry to evolve, more like dissolve it in a free sales channel.

[Fraser]

Everyone else in the country is protected by a minimum wage. Maybe it's about time we had a minimum commission.

Pushing data feeds containing products that don't pay anything is a joke and there's no way it should be acceptable. Perhaps if people really want it then there can be a special "I'm willing to accept no pay" datafeed but for the rest of us the default option should be to only include products we can actually make money on.

[ian]

I can't really see why anyone would want to promote 0% products, but I'm sure some people have their reasons. Couldn't the 0% products be split into a seperate data feed rather than introducing a new field to the file? Much less development work for affiliates that use the existing format.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Smacks of desperation if a network wants to create the extra work & technology for an override of 0% to keep a client onboard, when better time allocated elsewhere. And no reassurance that a merchant will accurately seperate the feed. And if a network does take this lonely road, then perhaps adopt Fraser's suggestion where enough scope is there for affiliates to choose a minimum commission for any particular category.

But it doesn't get rid of the trend it will introduce.

[Shane]

yup I agree Paul

Keith i can see 0.5% merrit in what you say.. but still 99.5% I'd say NO WAY to a feed including zero commission items.

I can see keith's argument that it's better to have something in a feed than nothing, at least you may make a sale at a later date on something you may get paid on but this isn't a feed with nothing in it.. there's plenty of paid products so forget the zero commission ones.. if you are that fussed about depth of coverage mix paid merchant feeds to cover as many products as you can but don't accept zero commission products... at all !

We know how stuff like this evolves.. it's human nature to try and make as much profit as possible so if it gets a toe in the door.. get ready for a deluge of zero commission products from an ever increasing pool of merchants making out they can't afford to pay for sales on product x or category y

This industry is bad enough as it is with unreliable tracking, dodgy merchants (ok and some affiliates before anyone says it's not just some merchants) questionable validations/rejections so to say yes that's fine to having feeds full of zero commission items is just asking to be screwed over even more.

If this gets established as acceptable zero commission items will grow in scope until eventually it'll be a joke.. merchants like dixons are looking for free sales, I don't believe there's not scope to even pay just 1% !! if that's the case then I say if they can't even afford to pay 1% on something they should stop selling it via affiliate channels ! or rejig their operation to make room for at least 1% .. they seriously can't expect affiliates to work for free !!!

This scenario is bad . . if left unchecked will get worse and eventually all the one's that welcomed this in will be bleating about how they USED to make a living in affiliate marketing before it became a not for profit hobby !

say no to zero commission products now, it's complete insult to the intelligence of any sane affiliate !

[drivetowin]

Paul

I think you're living in Utopia if you don't believe that already happens - lots of merchants have products that they deem to be non-commissionable.

I can understand why you wouldn't want to promote a 0% product via pay per click (or even on a website where you derive most of your own traffic via pay per click) but if you have websites that derive 99.9% of their traffic from either repeat visitors or natural search (as thankfully mine do) then the marginal cost of including the 0% products on my site is in reality close to zero.

Does that mean I'm happy to have them - no it doesn't - and networks should be doing their bit, whether via product feeds or not to ensue all products and actions on a merchant site are commissionable - slightly off topic but if you want to pick up on a real loophole, pick on the merchants who sign people up for a newsletter (electronic or physical) and pay zero commission for potentially acquiring a lifetime customer - yet all networks let merchants get away with that one, but I think it's incredibly naive to think that removing them from the product feed really achieves anything. If you send a visitor to the merchant site, whether by direct ppc, ppc from a landing page, ppc to a whole website, via a content site from natural search or from a newsletter, there is absolutely no guarantee that when that visitor lands on the merchant site they will buy the product you sent them there for - indeed in my experience a significant minority either buy another product as well as the original product, or buy something complete different.

If you remove the 0% commission items from the feed, it does not remove them from the merchant site, so if you send a visitor via a 3% item, and they buy the 0% item instead, you still get 0.00 commission, regardless of whether the 0% item is in the feed or not.

I think there is a fundamental difference in approach - ppc affiliates are after a quick fix sale make me money now, content affiliates are after a loyal site visitor who will come back time and again to their website and make money, hopefully over a period of several years.

And I don't know how many times i have to say this - having them in the feed as long as their clearly identified makes it simple for everyone - if you don't want to include them on your site you have an easy way via a simple SQL statement to exclude them, likewise if I want to include them then I can......it gives everyone the choice - neither of us in that scenario is making the others mind up for them.

Equally there is a difference betwen 'pushing' a product and 'including' a product. On my website unless you explicitly search for a 0% item you won't find it - it doesn't appear in any page other than search results - but equally, if someone explicitly searches it then I would rather they find it on my site, then trot off to another site, find it there, and that customer, which I may have spent seconds, minutes, days, weeks or even months nurturing wanders off to the other site forever.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Keith, don't patronise me with Utopia, you read the blogs.

Perhaps you would like to enlighten the forum members with the other merchants too.

wrt to margins, mine have increased significantly since omiiting / blocking the merchant as as said in another thread 18000 wasted clicks does not equate to 18000 lost users. Your maths is not correct in my opinion.

Your comments on purely SEO, though an excellent skill to have, is a puritan thought if other traffic drivers are not considered. Each affiliate may utilise one or a mix of any. So how they promote is their choice whether be SEO, Paid Search, Email, Social Media is their choice.

The subject of SEO and/or PPC being irrelevant to the topic.

If you cannot find the a majority of the products elsewhere which offer commission then perhaps that lacks research on your behalf.

<backhand volley down the baseline> Keiths go to return

[drivetowin]

Just to add, I discussed this very matter with Awin at the IAB Affiliate Council meeting on Wednesday.

Dixons argue that due to the costs of distribution and their margins overall on the affiliate programme, any item they sell below £x.xx (I would consider it wrong under commercial confidentiality to reveal on a public form what £x.xx is in Dixon's case) actually costs them money, and therefore there is no margin on those items to take commission from. I expressed the view that they had to take the rough with the smooth and even 0.5% commission is a massive improvement on 0%. Awin certainly have taken the point on board (after all 0% commission is not in their interest either) but whether Dixons will change their position - who knows...

[Fraser]

If you remove the 0% commission items from the feed, it does not remove them from the merchant site, so if you send a visitor via a 3% item, and they buy the 0% item instead, you still get 0.00 commission, regardless of whether the 0% item is in the feed or not.

That's a great point Keith but then does that not lead us to say that really there should be no 0% products on the site? Maybe the datafeed issue isn't the main issue and it's just that the idea of anything being 0% is totally unacceptable.

We all complain about leakage to other sites and expect merchants to do their best to convert our traffic so why would we allow them to get sales where affiliates are not rewarded?

[Bud]

As other threads have shown, there's not a simple answer to that question (neither answer suits me), but my thoughts are:

There shouldn't be any 0% commission items at all.

[drivetowin]

Paul

I would never try to patronise you and I apologise if that is the way it came over - I know it is a subject you feel strongly about (and one I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on).

[drivetowin]

That's a great point Keith but then does that not lead us to say that really there should be no 0% products on the site? Maybe the datafeed issue isn't the main issue and it's just that the idea of anything being 0% is totally unacceptable.

We all complain about leakage to other sites and expect merchants to do their best to convert our traffic so why would we allow them to get sales where affiliates are not rewarded?

Fraser - absolutely mate - as I said, I'm all in favour of having all items and actions commissionable - and without a doubt that is what we should all be pressuring networks to achieve for us - I just don't happen to believe the removal of 0% items from product feeds achieves anything.