Elaine’s Space

Yep, that’s how much I sent them last year - £313,000 worth of business and I earned £12591.59 in commission - quite a nice amount, paid for a few holidays and helped with the move to the new house.

The vast majority of this traffic originated from only a few pages:-
kids bedroom furniture - kids beds - kids bedding - nursery furniture

see a theme emerging here - mainly NON RETURNING PRODUCTS - although I will hold my hand up and confess to sending some traffic from my kids clothes page,  approximately 2.5%, and maybe some clothes were bought through my other links (but, then again, maybe some furniture was bought through my kids clothes links!).

Now, if I’d never included Next on these pages and carried on sending the traffic to my existing merchants, I reckon I would have made (taking an average of 7%) £21,910, an extra £9329, which is another nice amount - could have spent it at Next on new furniture for the new house!.

In 2008, if I had decided to keep Next, and assuming I sent the same amount of traffic, my commission would have plummeted to £6260 - BUT, not only have I removed them I’ve replaced them with some higher paying merchants (more about this laters), so my average commission should increase to, about, 8.5%, bringing me in £26,605 - and possibly more as Google as just promoted my best keywords to those top 3 positions.

Given the above you may wonder why I started to promote Next and thier 4% rate in the first place,  as I don’t normally include low paying merchants.   I knew I would make a success of it - they do have some lovely kids bedroom furniture and accessories - and I reasoned that if I sent them good, quality, converting traffic, they, like most of my other satisfied merchants, would actually reward me with an increase in commission - oh folly!

So, why didn’t I ditch them when they inflicted a 25% pay reduction by reducing the 4% to 3%?
Because I’m a trusting soul, and when they replied to my ‘angry’ email with a strong inference that they would be looking to introduce a category based commission structure, which would take into account Affiliates, like myself, who didn’t incur vast amounts of returned goods, I actually believed them.  I am considering changing my name to Pollyanna.

No prizes for guessing my reaction to the latest offering of 2%

Obviously I contacted Affiliate Window and informed them that I would be removing all Next links immediately, but would reinstate them if I was offered an higher rate in the light of the amount and quality of traffic I sent to them.  AW were very sympathetic and promised to put my case to them as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, for Next, in the meantime, the merchants I had replaced them with have performed amazingly well - Tradedoubler and Buyat must be rubbing their hands with glee - and I’d be criminally insane to start promoting Next again - and Dave would probably have me locked up!

So Which Merchants Am I Using In Place Of Next?
Letterbox on Affiliate Window
GLTC, Bedworld and The White Company on Tradedoubler
Littlewoods Direct, Mothercare and John Lewis on Buyat
Amazon - found some cool kids furniture and acccessories there!
Clothes - Freemans and Grattan (POR & CJ) they pay 10% and NO RETURN CLAWBACKS ( you have to wait 10 days though)
I’ll also be including Woolworths, Urchin, Blooming Marvelllous and La Redoute soon.

So there are quite a few good, quality merchants who pay a darn site higher commission, to choose from.

Why I think that letting big, brand name merchants get away with paying ludicrously low commission rates is so bad, in the long term, for Affiliates, is a whole other blog, probably entitled
YOU PAY PEANUTS - YOU GET MONKEYS