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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

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.

jpcooper 6y ago
What led you away from porn?
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Nothing in particular? I wanted to start my own company and I didn't have any compelling ideas for making porn better.
  - jpcooper 6y ago
    Fair enough.
0xfaded 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  - 0xfaded 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
m12k 6y ago
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.
- nikodunk 6y ago
  Hey! I just went through the exact same thing for https://Sunboxlabs.com 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 https://zlipa.com
- stickfigure 6y ago
doonesbury 6y ago
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 6y ago
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.

jpcooper 6y ago

What led you away from porn?

stickfigure 6y ago
Nothing in particular? I wanted to start my own company and I didn't have any compelling ideas for making porn better.
- jpcooper 6y ago
  Fair enough.

0xfaded 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
- 0xfaded 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

m12k 6y ago

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.

nikodunk 6y ago
Hey! I just went through the exact same thing for https://Sunboxlabs.com 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 https://zlipa.com
stickfigure 6y ago

doonesbury 6y ago

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 6y ago

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.