Need basic information, can anyone help?

[americana]

Hi everyone. My company is getting ready to relaunch one of our websites (a Yahoo! storefront) and we are looking to participate in an affiliate program (merchant's side). I looked at a third party company, Commission Junction (cj.com), which I'm sure a lot of you have already heard of. My question is what other affiliate marketing management companies I should look at. I don't like the fact that with CJ if you don't pay out $500 per month in commissions, then you have to pay them the difference. They don't give you any leeway to get started. I would imagine that we'd be paying out more than that anyway, but with the other costs ($2,250 set up fee; $250.00 annual fee, and additional commission fee per transaction to CJ), I'm not sure if the President of my company will go for it. Also, should I look into starting our own program, or would the easiest way to get started be to go through one of these third party companies. Any ideas, thoughts, knowledge would be helpful and greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Linda Buquet]

Hi americana,

Check out www.shareasale.com lower cost, no minimum, yet many of the benes of CJ.

[arvana]

Another way to go about the affiliate game is to use your own server-side software. It takes longer to build your affiliate list this way, but once you do, the list is your own with no percentages to pay out to a third party.

Here are a couple of free PHP scripts:

http://web-bureau.com/modules/free-p...ing-script.php
http://www.webradev.com/postaffiliate/index.php

The best professional package I've found so far is AssocTrac:

http://www.marketingtips.com/assoctrac/t.x/791445

Good luck!
Arvana

[TrafficProducer]

Links to check out. Performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet.

United Kingdom bias:-

http://www.ukaffiliates.com

http://www.affiliatewindow.com/?rid=25014

http://www.tradedoubler.com

United States bias:-

http://www.linkshare.com

Commission Junction, you've tried but I'll list it anyway
http://www.cj.com

[jackson992]

You mentioned you are using Yahoo Store. Are you aware of the image problem?

[elvis1000]

Try using iwhip.com, it is a free setup for now and if your product matches with the current traffic they have available they market it for you on a CPA basis, so they are not only the affiliate host but a big affiliate as well. Something the others should lookinto. Also I agree the yahoo store front should be re-thought.

** http://www.ultracashadvance.com

[Cedric]

I would like to strongly second Linda's suggestion of http://www.shareasale.com/

So seconded.

[MarketMe]

Hi americana,

A new and innovative player in the online affiliate marketing game is Infinity Click - http://www.infinityclick.com. They provide competitive search engine placement with no additional cost to you.

[americana]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I am going to start looking into them. Jack, you mention an image problem... can you elaborate?

[americana]

Elvis,

Just saw your message too. I'm afraid the Yahoo storefront thing cannot be rethought because it is already done, www.endlesstechnologies.com. The decision was not mine to make and I was brought on after the project was underway. I'm curious what your thought are on it. We have run into problems along the way, which I'd be happy to share with anyone. But now that it's up it seems really easy to manage, which is why my company decided to get it in the first place. They aren't the world's most tech savvy individuals and need to be able to revise pages themselves if they are the only ones here.

[Linda Buquet]

The image problem Jack is referring to is the fact that YahooStores will automatically rename your images at certain intervals which can result in missing images on the affiliates web site.

I don't know all the tech details but have seen this problem in action with clients. If affiliate pull a datafeed of all your products and lets say an image is named product3.gif, then Yahoo changes the image name without warning to exkly.gif the pic on the aff site won't work. So then you try to get your affiliate to update all their links and finally they all do. Pretty soon Yahoo changes exkly.gif to zinipt.gif and now the images don't show again. Multiply this times hundreds of images not just one. Makes the affiliates site look bad and hurts conversion rates.

I explained that very simplistically but was I kind of close Jack? Cedric?

[americana]

Wow, I wasn't aware of this problem - and it really is going to be a big problem. I just IMed the woman who set up our account and she was not aware that at any point the images on our storefront will be renamed. In fact, she said that they won't. I guess I'll have to look into this some more.

[Linda Buquet]

Maybe yahoo has corrected the problem but as of a couple of months ago this was a major issue. I know someone who has a workaround if it's still an issue for you. PM me if you want the contact info. Don't know what he charges.

[elvis1000]

Well Im gonna back peddle here. I never had a client that used yahoo as a processor, they all use in house systems. My gut reaction has always been a negative one on the store front becuase I always got sort of an "un-pro" vibe from it. But I actually did some research to see if my gut reaction was correct, but I did not see many people at all complaing about it, actually seemed like they were getting good traffic from it.... So

[Cedric]

From what I've seen the Yahoo! storefront is as professional as the person making the site. IOW, I don't think the limitations are with the storefront, but the developers.

[americana]

Talked to the store tech department over at Yahoo and they said that the pictures are renamed internally at Yahoo (once), but that it shouldn't pose a problem. They're going to look into it more for me.

So far the yahoo store has been extremely easy to manage. It is good for people who are not technically inclined, but who need to be able to make changes to their site whenever they want.

[americana]

I forgot to mention that I did look into shareasale.com and so far the program looks the same as CJ, but much cheaper... thanks for the tip.

[Linda Buquet]

You are very welcome. Glad to be of service!

[jackson992]

I love some of the merchants at Yahoo stores. However Linda explained the situation perfectly. One of my top performing merchants uses Yahoo Store but I have to redo the images every two weeks. This is a huge pain in the!

I wish there was something we could do as affiliates to get around this problem as many of the merchants aren't even aware of this. The merchant I talked to wasn't

[airguy]

Yahoo use to be pretty up front about not wanting to serve pictures up for other pages, i.e. ebay, aff sites and the like. I would bet that the reason that they are doing this is to cut down on the bandwidth.

Easy solution though, host your pictures on a site that will not change, you can even do this with a yahoo merchant account just not shopping. Have the aff sites link to those pictures or have them host the pictures themselves, only the link need take the customer to your site.

[Cedric]

jackson, you can choose to host all the images on your own server -- that's what I do.

[jackson992]

Cedric: Doesn't that kill your bandwidth?

Also how is that done with datafeeds?

[Cedric]

Second question first -- I don't do datafeeds, so I don't have a clue.

I have unlimited bandwidth... but even if I didn't, all of my affiliate sites together don't come close to sucking up the bandwidth of my old content site with very few images. ;)

But I also like to crop and compress images before they go on my site. Yeah, it's extra steps and time consuming, but, IMO, it well worth it to give a unified look to my site.