Which Affiliate Should Get Paid?

Ooooo good questions... I can think of scenarios where both deserve to get paid, where the first deserves to get paid and then scenarios for the last to get paid . In general though the last one in my opinion deserves to get paid because they are the last point of contact before the sale occurred. Then again I can come up with many reasons why the first person should get paid because they "might" of put a lot of effort into marketing.

What kind of question is this? How about all the affiliates that bring you customers? If they sell your shit, then you pay them. Done.

A sample scenario is customer reads a review at Person A's blog and goes to the affiliate product but doesn't buy - they decide to go back later. A week later they see an email from Person B which gets them thinking again. They go back to the affiliate product through Person B's link and then buy.

Both helped sell the product but only one can get paid. Which one do you think it should be?

Whoever sold the prduct...but it is commonly accepted that the last cookie gets the sale.

First gets a larger percentage since they got the customer there, the second gets a smaller cut.

What ever the percentage that you pay your affiliates, give the first 75%, the second 25%

Jonbones, in an ideal world everyone would get a share for the effort they put in but it's not really practical.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I was thinking last person as well but just recalled many discussions about Clickbank in particular where a product owner could snipe back a commission by dropping their affiliate link in an email series that their affiliate created the lead for.

I thought there might have been some going the other way due to that situation.

Yeah good points. I forgot that the opt-in landing page was the catch.

It's one thing I never understood: why would a vendor compromise their affiliate relationship? It's a false economy. The effort should be put in to make them succeed and to want to keep promoting your products.

I support last-cookie affiliate models (which is what I believe Amazon also does). In my industry, trading, there's a handful of "big list guys" who have harvested leads for years, and they use a first-cookie method when they do launches, which benefits themselves at the expense of all the subsequent affiliates. So it's like a small group of 5-8 guys with big lists chose on purpose to use 'first-tattoed leads'/first cookie, gets credit for the sale.

Even if it was months or longer ago that the lead got on their list.. which is unfair if for example a new affiliate spends a lot of time working to do a promotion for a recent campaign and it's their email sequence that actually produced the sale, the affiliate commissh still goes to the big-list "first cookie" guy. Totally unfair imo.

I'll be doing a lot to educate trading-industry affiliates to demand last-cookie affiliate programs, and also to encourage them to use IM guru-launch style "battle of the bonuses" to incentivize their leads to buy from them... so the person who earned the sale, gets the commissh.

I think the affiliate who made better pre-sell and sent highly targeted customer should get sell.

nrupen, that's not only hard to judge but nearly impossible to automate. The only way to do that is to ask the customer at checkout who referred them.

Malcolm: you're obviously new around here. You'll find the forum much more useful if you actually read the threads. Good luck.

The cookie stuffing issue didn't cross my mind and that's a really strong argument for last cookie. It's kind of what those list owners Ken was talking about do too, but above-board. Even a news feed of new products could take advantage of it. I'm sold.

I think the first should. I used to deal with commission awhile back and it would hurt after working with someone for a while, they don't buy but they come back and they buy from a coworker who just happened to be there.

This is a tough one, but I'm going to go with LAST because it was them that closed the sale.

If this is a matter of justice, both affiliates should share the commission.

Logically and technically, it should almost always be the last. However, as Alexa said... there will always be cases to the contrary with the 1st -and- even 'middle' promotions deserving it.

It depends on a lot of things.

I've promoted shit before and made one hell of a pre-sale, which resulted in guaranteed sales.

However, then they see affiliate B promoting the same product, with the same discount as my link, but they offer some "bonus" item that is nowhere near relevant to the product being sold, and they have never even used the product for themselves.

Meaning they have NO idea how to answer any questions if the customer should have any.

The customer buys from affiliate B - then they come crying to me when they need help, since I am the one who convinced them to purchase.

Even though they planned on purchasing due to MY promotions in the first place, they tried to find a better deal.

Then, when they have problems with anything, they think they can come crying to me for help, when I didn't even get commission? HA.. I don't think so.

Again, it depends entirely on the situation. We don't know the full details, so it's kinda hard to say who should get that commission.

I've been robbed of my earnings far too many times in the past because of stuff like that.

If someone wants to come to me for questions/help/etc, they can buy from me.

If they buy from someone else, they can go to that person for help.

I'm not gonna waste my time helping someone when I didn't even get credit for the sale.

And I'm sure as hell not gonna waste my time promoting that product in the future in that scenario.

Exactly... and that is my problem with just blindly giving it to the last affiliate cookie.

Read my previous reply. Its a 100% true (and unfortunately, all-too-often) story for not just myself, but for millions of affiliates out there.

I think it will still be fair to credit the last affiliate as that is the person that is able to get the customer to purchase the product. There is no perfect system so it will be more practical to take action on things that we have control over like doing more traffic generation activities, writing better presell copy and more.

I like last cookie gets the commission. Like others have said it is not perfect but it is the better of the two. Have I lost sales to another affiliate that got my potential buyer after me? Yes. Have I got sales after another affiliate did more pre-selling before me? Probably. I don't worry about it anymore since it all seems to even out and there is nothing you can do about it anyway.