The Affiliate Contract
So if the New York tax debacle (whether it’s repealed or not) has taught me anything, it’s this very important lesson: As an affiliate, the tenuousness of the contract you sign puts you in a horrible position.
It was so easy for merchants to remove NY affiliates from their programs, especially for independent merchants that have access to address data, and later on for networked merchants who got support in determining who was who.
It’s “at will” employment at it’s finest. A merchant you make $2000 a month with today can drop you this afternoon, at their discretion. Sure, it might not be the wisest choice on the part of the merchant to walk away from that revenue, but let’s say for arguments sake that the merchant felt all your sales were repeat customers, and you were only providing coupon tags while the shopper was on the merchant’s check out page.
You have no perceived value to them, so out you go. And what can you do about it? Promote their competition? Sure, but if you were getting traffic on a trademark search as opposed to a general product search, it might take you some time.
So the point of me even pointing this out is simple. I’m playing around now in the merchant realm, as a form of diversification. I can’t rely on crappy contracts to pay the mortgage anymore. So I’ll be selling kitchen ware and foods (like Romertopf clay bakers, etc). I’ve had a URL I’ve wanted to use for something like that for a few years now, so i decided to move on it.
I think it might be the beginning of the end for me as an affiliate. The industry has been good to me, but not good enough. And the current in fighting and what have you are only making it worse.
Tags: affiliate marketing