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Join your Merchant ABCs host Deborah Carney and Affiliate Eric Nagel as they talk about things merchants need to consider before they start an affiliate program.
Look at merchant site from shoppers perspective
- missing images
- broken links
- lack of professionalism, would you give them your credit card
- links on same site? Go offsite right away?
As affiliate:
- goes through checkout looking for leaks, places where shoppers could abandon cart, phone prompt,
- live chat that is commission based (bad)
- cart recovery – giving away info to 3rd party
- privacy policy
- bad color combination
- bad design
- about us should be complete
- consistent branding, does tracking carry over
Is merchant acting as an affiliate?
Here is an article Deborah wrote for FeedFront Magazine about this topic.
- sending traffic away to same or complementary products
- if you are running affiliate program can’t do that, need to get the merchandise in your cart
Really Basic:
Must link to only your own products on your own site or sites of yours that still track all the sales to your affiliate
Have very clear privacy policy, about us, and contact us pages and information
Live Help – not commission based, convert the sale with the affiliate retaining credit for sale
Make it clear to affiliates about non-commissionable items
No adsense, affiliates can target you
Adsense is a separate bot from the Googlebot, Adsense doesn’t bring search engines to you
Phone numbers:
Sales
- must be trackable, via tracking ID visible on site for operator to ask for, operator must ask for it, affiliates will test this before they promote you
- Pay per Call: affiliates get paid for the call by time in call, may be able to track percentage per sale soon
If Customer Service – as long as sales are completed by the customer online, not a problem
Make sure tracking works, test test test
Back up analytics so you can track where transactions came from and can find problems if they exist.
Get a good management firm, at least do a consultation with an expert, don’t try to do it all yourself.
Find us on Twitter:
Eric Nagel
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Merchant ABCs
Team Loxly
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