High Commissions for Affiliates-Good Marketing or Poor

by Jeff Casmer

Why is it that some affiliate programs offer you 50% commission or greater to promote their products or services and others give you a meager 5% affiliate commission?

As an affiliate marketer you're always on the hunt for the best products with high commissions for affiliates. But can you guarantee the product is high quality just because the commission is great?

Probably not, not unless you test it, which is what all affiliates should do though many of them do not. Those that do however, buy the product through their own affiliate link in order to get the product at a discount. Is this legal?

Well, many merchants fail to ban their affiliates from doing so, thus affiliates feel no reason to feel guilty. After all they need to test the product in order to promote it, and the merchant did make a sale.

There's a battle going on between merchants and affiliates. It's an unspoken one and has, for sometime, been kept very civil for quite some time, but I feel that everyone is beginning to lose their patience.

Offering high commissions for affiliates was a unique selling point a few years ago. If a merchant wanted to have their product stand out they told their affiliates that they would receive a commission of 50, 65, or in many cases now 75 percent on commission.

Affiliates took to this like ducks to water and merchants soon found that in order to get affiliates they had to offer high commissions. It became less of an option and more of a required sales strategy. However, offering high commissions for affiliates did not urge the affiliates to work any harder to sell the products. The 20/80 rule still exists- that is 20 percent of your affiliates are taking in 80 percent of the commissions. Some say it's even less than that, the number seems closer to six percent. What are all the other affiliates doing? Are they lazy or just inexperienced?

Products with high commissions are still high end products and high end products are hard to sell. Many affiliate marketers have little or no sales experience. Thus convincing someone that your 97 dollar ebook is like sliced bread (they can't live without it) will be challenging.

Some may opt for seedy tactics like spamming or stealing commissions to make sales. Should merchants still reward them for this? Does someone deserve a 50% commission to tarnish your name and put your business on the line?

Should merchants lower the commissions? By doing this, they may not be able to attract the good marketers out there. Savvy salespeople are going to want to be heavily rewarded for the efforts they are putting into sending you traffic, building your list, and creating sales.

What about all the merchants out there that can not afford to give their affiliates 65% commission, or feel no need to. Is it fair for a merchant to offer a high commissions for affiliates on well priced product that is an easy sell?

Are we at a crossroad? The internet has made it difficult to go backwards; merchants can not suddenly decide to offer 40% as the new high commission payout. Likewise affiliates can not expect merchants to make the selling process easier so they can all be top sellers.

What do we do? Do we let things be and have each side quietly grumble to themselves? Merchants on one side wishing they didn't have to offer so much for a product that took them months to create, and affiliates on the other hoping that the commission rate will go up even more since they are pouring themselves into a product that they didn't create.

Is there a resolution? We can't make both parties happy, can we?