[stickfigure]

Geez. This article was hard to follow but... it sounds like the merchant is really screwing up. My SaaS business gets most of our users via an affiliate program, and many years ago I worked in porn where nearly all of our users from an affiliate program.

The #1 rule of affiliate programs is to treat affiliates like royalty. Or more accurately - business partners. Be clear about what you offer, be generous, and always resolve reasonable misunderstandings in their favor. A single good affiliate can make your business. A bad reputation will destroy it.

There are third party affiliate software systems that can help with trust, but they are all terrible. Nothing substitutes for just being trustworthy. This post is probably going to be top news in the "keto affiliate community" (which, even without checking, I already know to be a thing) and it will be a problem.

[0xfaded]

Is there a good way to contact an online business directly and say "It seems you pay a 20% affiliate fee. I would like a 20% discount?" Amazon kinda does this with smile and donations, even though I don't use amazon anymore.

I go out of my way, with link strippers, cookie removers, adblockers, to the point of often manually copy and pasting links into a private window if necessary, to avoid affiliate links. When I do this I usually feel like I'm supporting the online store, but there are some cases (e.g. I'm looking for an oversized mattress) where I know the whole industry is corrupt and I just want to pay as little rent as possible.

[true_religion]

The affiliate fee is a payment for someone who did the work of marketing the product and finding new clients that would otherwise be inaccessible.

You didn’t do any of that. You are just a customer at best and don’t provide any additional value on top of the money you pay for the product. Charging less then is just the company shorting itself for a single customer.

[0xfaded]

That's one view. But my view is that affiliate links have created a massive race to the bottom, polluting search results and creating a new style of prose optimized for inserting key words and links.

I may not be able to stop that, but I certainly don't want to support it.

[Kalium]

Yeah, one of the major issues with running an affiliate program is that there's a real risk that they wind up finding ways to claim your regular customers as theirs. You don't gain anything from such transactions, but they do.

The incentives of affiliates and principals aren't as fully aligned as might be hoped.

[caymanjim]

It's also effectively defrauding whomever provided the affiliate link. I'm not claiming that it's legal fraud, but it's a mild ethical lapse. They did their job of marketing the product effectively enough that the parent was motivated to buy, and then the parent cheated them out of their reward. It's petty.

[nitrogen]

The only thing the merchant cares about is CAC. If a customer walks in on their own, and they can acquire their business for less than the affiliate fee, then why not?

[jskajakzkjx]

If some affiliate is actually doing the work of obtaining the customer to earn the fee, but then the customer has an economic incentive to strip the affiliate attribution to get the fee for themselves, then the affiliate isn’t getting paid. Maybe they’ll recommend another product instead, which doesn’t incentivize users to break the affiliate link.

[wolco2]

20% is rarely 20%. Most affilates have to reach a minimum and 90% never do. The small % who do are worth the 20%.

You trying to cut them out. I don't think it's in the sites best interest to offer people like you (cookie killers),a discount. If the affilates find out and they feel cheated they will move on.

Remember the affilate never gives one person at 20% (if they do they never hit their minimum) they give dozen/hundreds/thousands of customers.

[Retric]

That’s often what’s said, but the reality is different. It’s vastly easier for someone to get in between a future customer and a sale than it is to generate a new customer. Which is why affiliate programs are so frequently canceled without ill effect.

EX: Grubhub chnaginging Yelp phone numbers to get an affiliate commission on people looking up a restaurants phone number.

[aembleton]

If you're in the UK, then you can use Topcashback [1] or Quidco [2]. Both of these links are affiliate links too, so if you start receiving cashback then I'll get £20.

With both of these services, you get to collect the affiliate fee. Some things like insurance are huge and you can easily get £100 for them, most are much smaller.

1. https://www.topcashback.co.uk/ref/aembleton

2. https://www.quidco.com/raf/23003/

[0xfaded]

Hmmm, these meta affiliate links have confused my moral compass ;)

Lucky I'm not in the UK :)

[BostonEnginerd]

Honey and Rakuten’s eBates have similar programs.

[stickfigure]

Sure. Email them and ask.

Keep in mind though that affiliate programs are not necessarily sleazy. By default nobody knows about your product. Some of our partners have been making tutorials in other languages and building API integrations into their products. They deserve the money we send them.

[account42]

They may not be "sleazy" but they incentivize reviews/referrals/recommendations based on what the affiliate gets rather based on what product is the best. This pollutes the entired internet, making it significantly harder to find what you want as a consumer. On the whole, affiliate programs are a net negative for society and anyone taking part in them show reconsider their ethics.

[stickfigure]

You can say the exact same thing about all forms of marketing. By your logic, companies should never be allowed to advertise. Incumbents would love that.

Affiliate systems are the marketing equivalent of gig work. The quality of both product and affiliate are quite variable, but a good product and good affiliate are a strong net positive for society. Again, to use my case as an example, we have API integrations that we wouldn't have otherwise had and video tutorials in languages that we don't speak. Our customers love our product, I'm not ashamed to reward them for talking about it.

If you think every product should sell itself by 100% organic word of mouth... well, that's the rare exception, not the rule. If you're trying to build a business this way, you're in for a rough time.

[m12k]

Do you use any of this affiliate 3rd party software yourself or did you roll your own solution? I'd like to make an affiliate sales program for my SaaS too, but it's hard to figure out where to start. I don't want to invest a lot of time integrating with X if nobody uses X, but I also don't want to invest a lot of time in rolling my own if everyone expects you to be using X.

[stickfigure]

We wrote our own, but that's because of the nature of our business and our program. YMMV.

If you're trying to get professional affiliates to market your business, sure, use third party software. Most the affiliates know the systems already and have some level of trust in it. Plus the software will provide analytics, payouts to various countries, tax guidance, etc.

Our program is primarily a referral program for existing customers. There's no separate affiliate account and credits automatically offset the fees we charge. Plus I like Stripe and don't want a bunch of third-party PHP crapware invading our already complex billing system. DIY was really the only option.

The things that make our customers want to refer others are not necessarily what will work for anyone else. Our current referral system would never fly with the porn affiliates, but also an impersonal "make $ fast!" affiliate system would never resonate with our customers.

A basic referral tracking system is super easy. Give users links they can share; clicking on the link puts a value in local storage; pass that value along with signups. Offer something meaningful to new customers who come in through a referral (for us, it's a discounted first month). If you're just trying to increase word of mouth spread, that's enough to get started.

[nikodunk]

Hey! I just went through the exact same thing for https://Sunboxlabs.com - shareasale et al have high up-fronts or monthlies and their own integration cost. I know people are gonna tell me it’s not worth half a day of engineering/debugging, but this is what I did for a roll-your-own affiliate mvp: write a ten line script to check the search params and set them as local storage or cookie. On checkout pass that cookie through to PayPal. Done!

Obviously I’m not getting the exposure of shareasale, impact, etc from being on their platform, but I can still sign up for them once I’ve validated that affiliate works for high ticket item hardware.

[kposehn]

Ok, just going to ask everyone on this comment thread: would you be willing to test a system I have that is a super lightweight affiliate platform for startups?

I've been in the digital and affiliate space for well over a decade and have run programs from the tiny to the massive. Platforms like Impact, SAS and others are great, but if you're looking to get started and don't want to break the bank, let me know. It isn't a business, just a super simple platform for running a program that I built for my own use and could easily be used by others.

[ad31mar]

Sounds tempting. I was actually building one from scratch for my own business [0], but it's out of necessity rather than pleasure. Please get in touch!

[0] https://zlipa.com

[jpcooper]

What led you away from porn?

[stickfigure]

Nothing in particular? I wanted to start my own company and I didn't have any compelling ideas for making porn better.

[jpcooper]

Fair enough.

[doonesbury]

Agree! Like a Judge I was thinking: obviously there is a payment dispute since otherwise why would I be reading pleadings? But where in hell does it say what IT is?

The whole long story behind the dispute may be interesting for the writer of the story, but not in general. And those with long history, or institutional history by now the N+1th version of yet another dispute is not inherently interesting.

What is interesting is the OP's link may have discovered new area in the solution space. So please talk about that!

[badconvincer]

I would love to get into the porn business, how do I go about this? To clarify, not as a performer or cameraman but I’m not sure what other roles are available.