Ankesh,

That's an excellent idea (as usual you have some
of the best ideas on this board) but unfortunately,
that doesn't solve the online confidence issue.

What I mean by that, if you're an affiliate, you
still have to "trust" that the merchant is going
to give you credit.

With electronic tracking, an affiliate can log
into their account and see proof of the visitor
count they've sent and the conversion rate with
order count. It gives them verifiable proof that
the visitor did indeed make a purchase.

The beauty of electronic tracking is that instills
confidence in the tracking process.

When you take an order offline, you the affiliate,
don't know that it happened. You have to "trust"
that the merchant will tell you about it and
compensate you.

However, to your point. Any merchant could just
decide not to pay their affiliates, but that
wouldn't be smart. They wouldn't have many
affiliates for very long. But without the
"Online Confidence" factor, it will be VERY
hard (nearly impossible) to sign up many affiliates.

I actually took orders over the phone for one
of my products. Once I started an affiliate
program, I got a slew of emails telling me to
they wouldn't sign up until I took off the
phone ordering option.

David Frey
Author, Small Business Marketing Bible


The Small Business Marketing Bible