Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction Blog

Amidst all the excitement about booming online shopping in the US following Thanksgiving [Black Friday & CyberMonday], Yahoo Stores’ outage for almost the entire day on CyberMonday (about 12-14 hours, depending on who you hear the news from) generated quite some news.

Yahoo was left with a lot of ill-will from the tens of thousands of merchants that were affected at the worst possible time as far as these retailers were concerned and considerably negative PR, not just for the outage but also the manner in which the entire episode was handled.I believe that the outage may not have affected affiliate marketers significantly, though some of these merchants have been running their own affiliate programs. Yet, it is a good enough reminder/ warning for affiliates that send traffic to merchant sites to be fully aware of what is happening on their merchant sites, detect anything undesirable and take appropriate action accordingly. If it can happen to the best of Internet companies with top-notch infrastructure, and fairly robust systems and processes, the probability of something like this happening to other merchants that may not have capabilities anywhere close to that Yahoo possesses is only greater.

More often than not, instances such as these are exceptions over which an affiliate has very little control. However, precautions can and must be taken– the least of which would be to monitor the merchant site regularly and watch one’s conversion rates. While conversions can drop due to any number of reasons, at least the number should trigger some alarm for a closer look.

Another thought that occurs to me is: what kind of performance guarantees can merchants offer their affiliates? What kind of compensation can they offer to affiliates if the site falls below a certain performance level. Definining these key performance indicators and benchmarks may not be easy, but the merchants could certainly consider compensating affiliates for potential loss of commissions proportional to their past traffic volumes and conversion rates? There may be other fool-proof solutions available, which I’d be interested to know about. The idea is to have a fair mechanism that will ensure that affiliates who incur significant costs to drive traffic to merchant sites do not end up paying a heavy price for no fault of theirs.

Of course, the easy option for affiliates would be to move on to another merchant whose website is not facing problems, but my suggestion is in the spirit of building checks and balances and an environment in which both the merchants and affiliates feel the stake in ensuring success of their affiliate marketing program.