There is something that bothers me when I see someone purchase one of the products that I’ve helped create with their own affiliate link.
Not familiar with that particular “strategy”? Essentially what is happening here is that someone signs up to be an affiliate for one of our products first (like Standard Theme or Live Theme) and then goes and purchases the product through their own link, and since we give a whopping 50% of the sale they, in effect, get the product for 50% off.
Yes, they are essentially paying themselves to buy our products. If the sale was $100 they get $50.
Sounds like a raw deal, right? I’ll admit that every time I get an email in my inbox about a sale I am always curious to see if the buyer used their own affiliate link and I do feel a little burned.
But here’s the thing: There is really nothing I can do about it, and enforcement is nothing more than attempting to “punish” or “revoke” access to the product and/or services upon discovery.
Some organizations, like Amazon, have explicit call-outs to prevent this type of abuse:
You may not purchase products during sessions initiated through your own Associates links and will not receive referral fees for such orders. This includes orders for customers, orders on behalf of customers, and orders for products to be used by you, your friends, your relatives, or your associates in any manner.
But, there doesn’t seem to be anyway that they’ve created to enforce it – yet.
On the products that my team builds that offer affiliate relationships we don’t have anything like Amazon but we may consider it for the future.
What’s the Big Deal?
It’s a big deal for a few reasons, some more subjective than others:
- It breaks Terms of Service. That’s illegal folks.
- It takes advantage of businesses that offer affiliate marketing. Don’t blame it on the technology, it’s you.
- For me and my team these products put food on the table and roofs over our head. We look for our sales to fulfill our duty as husbands and providers. We believe that our products are priced competitively and fairly. Don’t “pull one over” on us just because you can.
- As moral and upstanding Christ-followers, could you stand before your congregation (and yes, there are some Pastors who are doing this) and share this “online strategy” with confidence and without shame? Set a good example; be men and women of integrity, which means doing the right thing even when no one is looking over your shoulder as you buy things online.
- Stay above board. We know what you’re doing and we know who you are. Newer technology will be eventually created to stop this abuse (if it’s not already created) but we already have data on the offending parties.
It’s just the right thing to do. Many of you might see it otherwise, and that’s fine, but I wanted to be explicit with my perspective.
Nothing But Gratitude
Ultimately I have nothing but gratitude for our current customers, regardless of how they came about supporting us. It is you, the community, that makes a lot of this possible.
The biggest argument for justifying this type of tactic is the idea that the buyer still “supports” the company so the business should be happy with any sales that they get. I understand this and I am appreciative. Extremely. But that doesn’t make it right.
Thanks all for your support and let everyman do what he feels is right in his own conscience and heart.
Graham Brenna says
Totally agree with you. My affiliate link for Standard Theme has sold two licenses lately and when I get the email informing me I like to be genuinely surprised. I think I know who bought them from my links because I’ve gotten a few tweets asking for some advice on ST from a friend of mine.
I hear your pain on this issue… hopefully someone creates something soon that makes this harder to do.
Jared Erickson says
and because you have sold two you basically got it for FREE! so affiliate WIN
Garrett Moon says
I actually disagree with this post on some levels. Affiliate sales are a form of marketing in which someone is rewarded for recommending and/or selling a product. It is a marketing tactic in which you leverage other people’s networks to sell your goods. Essentially, your affiliates become advocates for your product and you extend your reach. This is a good thing for your product and the person acting as the affiliate should be rewarded. If this means that they use their association with the affilate program to purchase products for themselves then that is just a part of their reward.
It is kind of like working in a store. You sell products and gain commission, but you also enjoying buying those products at a discount. This works, because by using the products you become more familiar with them and further improve your ability to sell.
We are in the process of building an affiliate program ourselves and anyone who acts as the ‘advocate’ for our product is given the benefit of the discount. That is just part of the deal. I want to reward them for helping our product reach new audiences and I want to give them an incentive to do so.
Now, to some degree we could be talking about different things here. If someone signs up to be an affiliate just to get 50% off and never attempts to make another sale, then sure that rubs the ethical boundaries the wrong way. Affiliate programs aren’t coupons, they are incentives to sell but I would argue that the problem here wasn’t that they used their own link. The problem is that the person never acted like, or intended to be, an actual affiliate in the first place.
There are a few products that my company buys regularly with our affiliate links. Often times, we are buying them on behalf of our clients. Those sales are generated because we are advocates and implementors of the product. We use them regularly and without our affiliation these sales wouldn’t be taking place in the first place. We deserve the affiliate kick back because we are promoting and selling the product. I also don’t think it is unreasonable in the least for us to assume that we can enjoy the discount for ourselves when needed.
Anyhow, I can understand the frustration that arises when an affiliate program is treated like a coupon book. Interesting discussion. In many ways I think it just comes down to the structure of the affiliate program itself.
Jared Erickson says
I hear what you are saying, I think the post is written more about the second point.. the person that signs up for affiliate just to use it once for themselves.. then removes the link in the footer.
Rodlie says
I think it still seems shady, though. I think it’s one thing if the seller of the product mentions on the front-end that, by signing up as an affiliate you’ll get a 50% discount, but in the absence of such a statement, it does seem ethically foul. The idea of them removing the link after they sign up, then, is above and beyond the call of shadiness.
Adam Shields says
My first thought is to wonder how the affiliate links work. I know I have accidentally purchased things on Amazon from my own affiliate link because of an active cookie. I buy a lot from Amazon and am always adding and tweeking affiliate links on my blog.
Carl Thomas says
It’s your affiliate program. Put what you want in the terms of service. Pretty simple. During the time I lived off of affiliate marketing, I found some vendors allowed affiliates to buy off of their own links and others did not.
If you sign an affiliate that has no capacity to sell a premium theme other than a 125×125 on a low volume blog, you can’t be surprised that their only sale would be to themselves. In effect you paid $50 for advertising on their blog. You have to look at your business plan and decide if that makes sense.
If that same person generated 150 sales a month, you could care less that they used the link for themselves.
Affiliates get products at discount, and use their own money to market them. Whether it is for personal use or re-sale is irrelevant in my opinion.
Again, you get to write the tos for your program. There is nothing unethical about an affiliate working within the tos you wrote.
Travis Fish says
These are some interesting responses to the post. I agreed with you fully and still do, but there sure are some good arguments that go the other way.
Chris Loach says
I’ve wondered about this before. It’s interesting to view other peoples opinions on it, like it’s not stealing. People think if they download music/software illegally too they aren’t stealing because it’s not a physical product. I think it’s sad. Whatever the affiliate has in their terms of service is law.
Adam Shields says
I think we need to be careful with words like “law” and “stealing”. I think we often know what we mean. But an agreement between two people is a contract. They can be broken and within the contract should be ways to deal with that. But that is not the same thing as a criminal violation. Even though many people want copyright and intellectual property issues to be handled exclusively by government, right now they are primarily civil issues. That does not mean that we should be violating terms of contracts or TOS intentionally or willfully, I do think there should be allowences for ignorance. Posts like this can help deal with ignorance. Dealing with people through terms of the affiliate agreement will handle others.
But out of control TOS are an issue (this is off topic). Last time I updated itunes I noticed that I had to agree to 37 printed page TOS to use a free piece of software.
Garrett Moon says
I don’t think it has anything to do with stealing or the law. Like other commentors have pointed out there are a lot of different ways to structure an affiliate program. If using your own link is not allowed in the TOS that is fine. Personally, I think that ruins the spirit of a good affiliate program but none-the-less if they are going against the TOC their affiliate link should be canceled and they shouldn’t be given their kick back payments.
adam says
Wow. That is crazy. That stinks for you and those that could have honestly got an affiliate sale.
Ben Miller says
I’ve never even thought about doing this before, so I’ve never thought about the ethical implications before this. I have a couple of questions:
1. If someone buys from their own affiliate link, why do you care who the sales commission goes to?
2. If your TOS says that you can’t buy from your own affiliate link, and someone does it anyway, couldn’t you just refuse to send them the commission?
Steve says
I think that if this is something that you would not like affiliates to do, then the call out box is a good way to make this clear. Most people would happily comply with this (they don’t need it to be enforced) if they know that this is the desire of the developer. Not every affiliate program has a problem with this – so if this is a concern, I think it’s good to make it clear up front.
To be honest, I hadn’t thought of this in terms of ‘stealing’ before. I’ve once purchased a product via my own affiliate link, and didn’t think I was doing something wrong. I didn’t do it with the intention of ripping anyone off, or stealing or even something to be ashamed of. I wanted to use the product, and I wanted to promote the product, and so I set-up the program, purchased the product and started promoting it. I’d hate to think that the developer is now considering me a thief – the very thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Perhaps it should have.
Whilst this might be clear in the terms of service, as one commenter noted, terms of service are so long and complex now it’s difficult for anyone to read and understand what they mean. This isn’t an excuse for agreeing to something we don’t understand, however, how many of us have installed software and read through the entire agreement before clicking ‘I agree’?
Kenny says
I agree with Garrett that you shouldn’t see this necessarily as an ethical violation. Especially when it isn’t stated in your TOS that disallowing it is your intention.
Having a fair bit of experience with affiliate promotions and benefiting from relationships with some good affiliate managers along the way, I don’t think your view is necessarily the majority one.
In fact, I would advise you to adopt the exact opposite point of view. Many programs actually encourage marketers to sign-up for their affiliate program and buy through their own affiliate link. Why? Because of two things: 1) It makes a sale. At the end of the day, a sale is a sale. And especially with digital content, where you have infinite inventory and distribution costs are negligible, it is not just a sale, it’s profit. and 2) you want to get the product in the hands of the affiliate that you are hoping will spread the word and promote your product for you. The more people that are using your awesome product, the more opportunity for WOMM to happen.
If you flipped the scripts one could also look at it this way: If you hired a direct sales force, would you want to hire a fleet of people to hawk your wares without firsthand knowledge of your product and its benefits? Would you want your products to be represented in ways that are just superficial and employing superlatives in the marketing collateral without any real authenticity behind it? That in itself is kind of not-so-right either. And if you’re requiring the very people who you want to be the evangelists on your behalf — fully vested in your value and benefits of your product offerings — also have to pay full price, that doesn’t sound so kosher either, does it? But that would be exactly the result of any further action based on your reaction described in your post today.
BTW, I also do agree that those individuals who use this affiliate-just-so-the-can-buy-it-at-a-discount strategy — merely a self-couponing strategy without any intention of promotion nor any ability to do so (no network, publishing platform, etc) — are the ones that should not be allowed to do so. That ain’t good. Of course, this is where differences in affiliate program management come into play. If you’ve auto-approved them without vetting any potential for promotional abilities (do they have a blog, website, social media following, email list, PPC experience, etc?) then perhaps this is where you need to reconsider how you do address this.
Perhaps sharing some of my own direct experience with this might help open your mind to other possibilities than your current position? Personally, I actually did buy your Standard Theme through my own affiliate link (I’m 90% sure it was through the actual link). I for one did make the purchase out of an intention to support your business. Your content has been useful over the recent years, and while there are some departures on my side from some of your positions (like this one), I respect your work (and I hope vice versa!). As I’m deciding what new products to build out new mini sites for promotional activities over the next year, I decided to consider your Standard Theme product. It is a product that is relevant to my other business lines and the other reason is, well, I like you, bro! That said, after downloading the product, I’ve already tweeted an affiliate link, included the link in some LinkedIn discussion forums in response to some threads like one debating websites vs. blog for service professionals (why not both on a WP platform and install a professional look that accomplished SEO too with something like Standard Theme?!), and some relevant discussions in my other LinkedIn special interest groups.
I did have Standard Theme installed on a new blog to test out, but haven’t fully completed customization yet. In fact, because of the installation process (which is much more complicate than expected after seeing the tons of control panel options in person), I have been better informed about whom I can/should recommend your Standard Theme product to as I go along. I, as an affiliate of your product, would never have seen any of this would having it in my hands personally. I try out many products in consideration of promotional potential and if this is one that ends up being something I decide to strategically promote on its own (vs. ad-hoc / casual promotion, or a plain decision to drop it), I would potentially pursue developing a mini marketing plan that would might involve a dedicated website (in this case made with the actual product!), downloadable PDFs, videos, etc. I would confidently say that the value of my time invested so far to investigate your product first hand is worth more than the discount obtained using the affiliate link.
As a publisher, there are tons of other products that can usually be promoted in substitution within almost all product categories. It can be competitive to get the attention of super affiliates that know how to sell in this format. Regarding any affiliate that ends up promoting your products, that initial discount is a very affordable and frankly cheap cost for recruiting a productive affiliate. I believe this is the reasoning behind why some of the larger affiliate managers don’t have a problem with affiliates using their own affiliate link to promote your product.
Worst case scenario with that position, the affiliate doesn’t end up promoting your products, but you still made a sale! If you had it the other way, you would accrue a roster of thousands of affiliates, of which a huge majority (probably 95%+ realistically) never made a sale, nor ever bought your product at any price (this end result of having tons of non-active affiliates in the program is the norm for most programs). They were just a waste in bandwidth managing them through the program.
Hope this offers up some tangible reasons to reconsider your position? Or perhaps you don’t have a problem with legitimate potential affiliated partners doing this, you’re talking about those dead weight, cheapo fat wallet slick deals dot net lifers that just want to pay less at all cost?
Steve says
There’s another valid reason to purchase through your own affiliate link – if you build sites for others. I’ve built sites for Christian organisations, and did this through an affiliate account. This saved them money – I was only charging them for the cost of themes, hosting etc – not for my own time.