Like most businesses, affiliate marketing has been affected by recessionary measures too. What is troublesome, is the fact there isn’t any justification plausible enough to render such a move by merchants. A channel of distribution that relies on performance one hundred percent of the times, it seem rather careless, and unfortunate that merchants would treat a channel that has the potential to help them increase their chances of positive growth with such dishonesty and disrespect.
As affiliate commissions have been dropped by several online businesses, their reasons for doing so remain vague at best. Maybe it’s just a psychological thing that makes them feel a part of the ‘hype’, in this case, recession. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. It definitely is not a good idea, and, no matter how they put the message across, it is going to sound desperate. A desperate enough attempt where most merchants do not even bother to send out a human-written notification.
This particular act has affected most affiliate marketers, who depend on the one affiliate marketing metric that is available – performance. They are certainly not happy. And rightly so, because all they needed from merchants were the incentive to perform. Take away that formula, and it doesn’t take a marketing genius to understand the ramifications. Words like ‘misguided’ and ‘unfair’ can be seen everywhere. From Tweets to rants disapproving and demonstrating discontent as status updates. From books to tabloids t news articles. This goes to show the after-effects of sudden unthought-of decisions that impact a group as a community.
Since the very basis of affiliate marketing speaks of performance-based marketing, making the compensation provided for that performance less enticing will create an imbalance in the system where motivation is directly proportionate to compensation. This immediately shifts the scale away from loyalty.
Terms where compensation cuts are targeted toward affiliates who, for whatever reason, have not performed in the preceding year only serves to create a gap between affiliate marketers and merchants. And in the process, merchants may well lose out on established opportunities to benefit from. Because once merchants lose affiliates marketers, they almost always never get them back!
Even if you want to make certain changes to affiliate compensation, then do it at the outset. The gravest formula for hitting rock bottom is when you decide to tweak compensation – lowering affiliate commissions – during the life of your affiliate program.
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