0% Commission – Can We Classify Finance Merchants Under This?
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
It is generally acknowledged & agreed that 0% commission has no place in the affiliate marketing space. There are enough threads & blogs pertaining to this which I will append later where several merchants were bought to our attention.
However, haven’t we been overlooking finance merchants?!
Now a finance merchant may have a suite of products ranging from various types of insurance to loans to credit cards.
If you examine the plethora of finance merchants available for affiliates to promote, do they all offer commission on their full suite of products? The answer is no, such that a program might only offer commission on a lesser popular product like business / commercial insurance when their core selling products might be car or home insurance which are all very easily accessible from the primary landing page and are on the main merchants site. In some instances I beleive this is intentional, for those which it is not .. well it’s very convenient isn’t it?
In my personal opinion these program are a bit of a scam offering commission on what I believe are lower traffic areas of their site. In a way similar to a merchant offering zero % commission on products.
Granted some finance merchants may have a program set up for one of their core products like car insurance products, again, what about all the others within their suite?
There are enough examples of this on several of the networks if you take a few minutes out to look.
Cookie Cross Pollination
You’ll also notice that quite often with finance merchants, if they are offering commission on different products, they split these into different programs, one might be for selling car insurance & the other might be for home insurance. Assuming the affiliate is signed up to both programs, does the cookie pollinate across the programs? i.e. the customer visits via the home insurance link but might end up purchasing car insurance.
Why are we generally NOT fully informed?
My Gripe With OMG
Don’t get me wrong, there are a smashing group of people there. OMG can be considered primarily as a finance orientated network.
What grates me is that individual products for each merchant are separated into different programs, granted there maybe different budget allocations to each, but are we informed which have cookie cross pollination or more still why can’t we simply have one link which encumbers all for a specific finance merchant & then as long as we are signed up to their other products we’ll still receive commission from these. Personally I find it a real pain having to sign up to multiple programs of the same merchant & have multiple links which I might not need, many with the most lengthy superfluous program names I can imagine. ie Endsleigh Insurance on OMG have 7 seperate programs & Buy.at have simplified it under the single program which is preferable.
Just imagine a retail merchant offering several thousand products & thus having a program for each product?
Come on OMG make life easier for us, you might find you’ll actually get more sales by simplifying & please get rid of all those brand bidding groups which I noticed when going through your merchants at the weekend.
Summary
On the whole I do think finance merchants have generally been getting away with things lightly & whether intentionally or conveniently enjoying the free ride on the gravy train, unless they offer commission on their full suite of products they could be deemed as merchants offering 0% commissions, thus why should different rules apply to them?
No doubt we’ll get counter explained as something about budget allocation & different departments of finance merchants versus the mark up & profit margins on retail products.
