• Let's talk semantics. When's an affilate really a merchant or subaffiliate or something else?

    by
    KenW3
    Published on December 20th, 2011 06:24 AM
    Quote Originally Posted by Kay View Post
    The first thing which causes confusion for me is when I read that people want to find affiliates. Is that really what they mean?

    If you have something to sell and you want other people to sell it on your behalf (they usually earn a commission for the sales they make) then you are a vendor or merchant who wants affiliates to sell your goods or services.

    If you don't have a product or service to sell, but you want to sell someone else's product, then you are an affiliate.

    I am an affiliate of Amazon because I sell books on their behalf. Amazon is not my affiliate, they are a merchant, (or vendor, if you prefer).
    That's perfectly clear. Vendors and merchants have salespeople and affiliates.

    The way I would write a description of an affiliate is: A person or business that agrees to act in a sales capacity for a merchant, selling the merchant's products or services for a benefit to themselves (payment, commission, or other incentive).

    Quote Originally Posted by Kay View Post
    Even some people who have been in the AM business for years still talk about their "affiliates". They don't have any affiliates, they are affiliated to certain merchants.
    I've run across people who speak of merchants as 'their affiliates', and that usually requires a lesson in semantics. A merchant is someone who sells products or services, on or off the internet.

    Some very successful affiliates take their sales efforts off the web, and promote locally for an online company. It is an approach that can often have less competition and less sales resistance.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheodoreK View Post
    some people might be signed in multi-tiered affiliate programs. In such programs you are an affiliate yourself, much like how you describe in your post, but you can also sign people under you to be "your" affiliates.
    I can see how this would be interpreted as having affiliates, as this is a variation of multi-level marketing (MLM) aka network marketing. On a multi-tier affiliate program, new affiliates referred to a merchant by an existing affiliate will receive bonuses or percentages. These are not affiliates of an affiliate (or an MLM downline) but are an affiliate of the same merchant.

    Some of the descriptions refer to these 'lower' tier affiliates as a subaffiliate, but only for the purpose of explaining payouts. For the purposes of definition they are just known as affiliates. Unfortunately, someone was inspired to create a definition for MLA (multi-level affiliate) programs to correspond to MLM descriptions; This further clouds multi-tier affiliate definitions.

    Semantics is a pain, especially across countries with differing definitions for the same words. This is confusing just trying to write it. The other difficulty is descriptions of joint venture marketing agreements in contrast to affiliate marketing. Anyone care to take on describing those differences?
    This article was originally published in forum thread: Let's talk about Affiliate Marketing (AM) started by Kay View original post