New Twist To Affiliate Programs

In the world of the Internet, an “affiliate program” is a commission arrangement with another DOT-COM business, to advertise and promote your services and/or products. When a visitor clicks on the product or service message at the affiliates website they are taken to the company’s website in order to complete the transaction. This might be as simple as signing up for a newsletter, requesting an estimate, or buying a service or product. If, and when the order is completed - shipped (if it’s a physical product) and paid for, the company sends the affiliate their commission.

Affiliates can spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month promoting their websites in order to capture the visitors and turn them over to a company in the hopes of obtaining a commission. There are hundreds of thousands affiliates around the world, thousands of companies providing affiliate programs and hundreds of companies acting as agents or brokers for affiliates and companies. This is big business!

Sounds simple enough, but all that glistens is not gold.

More and more companies now operate website catalogues and retail operations. If as an example we look at Home Depot, they have an affiliate program which is meant to drive online shoppers to the Home Depot website and if an order is consummated, at the website, the affiliate will receive a commission. However, Home Depot’s online presence is not only to consummate online shopping but also, to drive potential customers to their stores. If an online customer decides to visit their local Home Depot, rather than consummating the order online the affiliate gets nothing for their efforts in bringing a customer to a Home Depot retail store.

Affiliates retaliate by not investing in page space or advertising for these types of combined online and retail operations. The result is that both the affiliate and the online retailer looses out.

A Win, Win Program:

The company that provides both online shopping and a retail store front wants the affiliates to remain and if at all possible drive traffic to both their retail outlets and their online shopping website.

How can they accomplish this?

iFLOOR.com operates a large online catalogue for hardwood, laminate, cork and bamboo flooring. They also operate 23 retail outlets in 15 states and they are expanding their retail operations monthly. They claim to be the largest online flooring store in America so it is important that they maintain the affiliates that drive customers to their online website and catalogue. But, the larger their retail store front operations grow the more frustrated the affiliates will get in driving customers to iFLOOR.com without compensation.

In order to maintain their excellent working relationship with their affiliates they have created “Exclusive” retail discount codes for online shoppers that are directed from an affiliate site.

A case in point is an iFLOOR.com, Special Offer of a $50 discount off of a $500 purchase offered exclusively by Renovation-Headquarters.com an iFLOOR.com affiliate. If you visit the Renovation-Headquarters.com site, you are presented with a discount code. When shopping at the store, you present the discount code to the sales clerk and you receive a $50 discount off your order. The discount code is tracked back to Renovation-Headquarters.com and they receive a commission on the order that was consummated at the retail outlet, definitely a win, win situation! The company consummated a sale and the affiliate earned a commission.

With the number of online catalogue stores investing in retail store fronts I would expect to see many more creative programs such as the one being used by iFLOOR.com and Renovation-Headquarters.com