Deep link question

1BIZLIST · 23-03-06

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie to all this so any help would be much appreciated

Hopefully someone would be so kind as to answer a question or two on deeplinks for me.

If I deep link to a product on a merchants site, is commission normally paid on the whole basket or just the single item should they choose to buy it?

Atm I am setting up my website to deeplink to products and then take the customer directly to the merchants site in a new browser window, is this the way to go or should I be doing something else, like for instance a popup window?

Do the bigger affiliates use their own shopping cart somehow or use the merchants ? sorry this might seem like a complete newbie question :eek:

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Mark.

Ben Cockburn · 23-03-06

Hi Mark,

There might be exceptions to the rule, but generally it's paid on the full value of the basket. Technically it's all about how the tracking works - as a network we don't match up what customers landed on and what they purchased, all we're worried about is whether that customer has come via any of our links and they have a cookie set on our system. After all, the standard link (which is just a hidden deeplink) generally takes customers direct to the main page, which may not display any products at all. What would the merchant pay for in that situation?

I can't comment on what is best (I'm not an affiliate myself) but as a user, popups irritate me immensely and my web browsers are set to kill them. If you meant running affiliate links in popups it might be considered spammy and you may be asked to justify the practice - after all, all that person did was visit your site and you have automatically cookie'd them. It's a practice that has been abused so if you do be careful how you implement it.

I can't speak across the whole industry but I'm not aware of affiliates having their own shopping carts. I can imagine it happening but perhaps when you get to that stage it's not really affiliate marketing anymore.

I hope that helps.

Ben

lakrasia · 23-03-06

If a user clicks on a link to a t-shirt and then instead buys a pair of jeans, but no t-shirt you get the commission. Though I haven't tested it out, I'll be extremely surprised if anyone says I'm wrong on this.

The only merchant I'm aware of that differentiates between deep link sales is Amazon - they pay a higher commission if the user buys the item in the deep link and a lower commission on everything else they buy following the link.

Hard to say whether to open in a new window - this often causes a pop-up warning. Also, it depends on your site. E.g. if you have a site that's dedicated to one merchant, open it in the same window, as you have little reason to want them to return to your site once you've made the click. If your site has a lot of different stuff on it, for different merchants, you might want to open the link in a new window, in case the user wants to return to your site to check other things if they don't find what they want from the merchant.

1BIZLIST · 25-03-06

Hi,

Thanks very much for the responses, I was hoping this was the case.

Mark.