Affiliate Snubs – Do They Actually Realize What They’re Doing?
And of course if I’m going to link to the site, why not use a commission link? So I logged into Linkshare, went to Office Depot, and applied – only to read this:
This merchant has established certain criteria for affiliates applying to their program. Unfortunately, your site does not meet one or more of these criteria. For more specific approval information, please refer to the merchant’s application criteria.
Now, they can phrase it as politely as they wish, but the fact is this: they don’t consider me ‘good’ enough to belong to their group. And apparently, while I can work for free, my goodwill is not worth actual cash.
And I realized something else – even as impersonal and businesslike as all this is, it STILL annoys me.
And I bet it annoys other people.
And more importantly, Office Depot lost a glowing testimonial.
Because instead of my planned post, going into detail on my purchase, all the effort I went into picking it and why it was the ‘best’ for what I wanted, now I don’t feel like sending Office Depot the business.
Instead, I’m now posting about online snubs, and how filtering whether a poster is good enough is a risky proposition for any business.
Because while it won’t affect my shopping habits, at least in my case they traded a positive post for a negative one.
And they are also stating that my readership isn’t worth advertising to as well.
In the end, filtering out people is bad business. Quite frankly, I would accept everyone into an affiliate program for just this reason – because annoying people is worse than having useless affiliate members not doing much business for you.
Especially if you’re using a third party site like Linkshare or Commission Junction (where the managing is handled for you), it’s really a no-brainer to accept everybody and anybody.
After all, even if my not-quite-good-enough can get you a sale, it IS a sale, right?
