pros and cons
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| pros and cons |
While affiliate marketing certainly deserves increasing recognition for its key role in growth, it is still a young industry with all the growing pains that that involves.
What is holding people back?
There are seldom contracts in place between affiliates and merchants. For a merchant, this means that an affiliate could decide to stop promoting your programme, with no notice given. This could lead to a sudden traffic and sales drop, depending on how reliant the merchant had been on that affiliate.
Similarly, merchants may decide to terminate a programme, meaning a loss of revenue for affiliates. Particularly if little notice is given, affiliates might have spent time and money setting up promotions, only to have the campaign pulled out from underneath. Most infamously, ASOS.com did this a couple of years ago.
There is still little to no industry regulation, though the majority of the industry does strive to best practices. While some affiliates have resorted to shady practices in the past (with adware and email spam), the majority have banded together to blacklist this kind of behaviour. The spectre still remains though.
Some merchants fear a loss of brand control.
Affiliate programmes are not easily scalable.
But, of course, there are so many benefits to affiliate marketing:
It’s pay for performance marketing, so merchants are only paying for growth.
The merchant sales force just got bigger, as well as its branding potential.
There is a very low barrier to entry for both affiliates and merchants.
What is holding people back?
There are seldom contracts in place between affiliates and merchants. For a merchant, this means that an affiliate could decide to stop promoting your programme, with no notice given. This could lead to a sudden traffic and sales drop, depending on how reliant the merchant had been on that affiliate.
Similarly, merchants may decide to terminate a programme, meaning a loss of revenue for affiliates. Particularly if little notice is given, affiliates might have spent time and money setting up promotions, only to have the campaign pulled out from underneath. Most infamously, ASOS.com did this a couple of years ago.
There is still little to no industry regulation, though the majority of the industry does strive to best practices. While some affiliates have resorted to shady practices in the past (with adware and email spam), the majority have banded together to blacklist this kind of behaviour. The spectre still remains though.
Some merchants fear a loss of brand control.
Affiliate programmes are not easily scalable.
But, of course, there are so many benefits to affiliate marketing:
It’s pay for performance marketing, so merchants are only paying for growth.
The merchant sales force just got bigger, as well as its branding potential.
There is a very low barrier to entry for both affiliates and merchants.
