Cashback Sites
It wasn’t long after the birth of affiliate marketing that cashback sites started to appear. These are sites which offer consumers a refund on items they purchase, through the use of affiliate schemes. For example, if a merchant were to run an affiliate program, offering affiliates a 10% commission on all sales, a cashback site could offer consumers anywhere up to 10% off their order value. From the merchant’s point of view, it is still worth paying a commission in the form of a refund to the buyer if it results in a new sale. At first glance, this appears to be a system which benefits everybody. Merchants get extra sales, affiliate networks get extra commissions, and consumers get a better deal. However, the person who loses out is the affiliate who might have already referred the customer.
If a review site is funded by affiliate revenue, they expect that if any of their visitors go on to make a purchase based on their reviews, they should receive a commission. If at the point the visitor was about to make a purchase, they then went through a cashback site, the most recent cookie would be overwritten. This means that the affiliate has gone to all of the work of getting the customer to the point of sale, for the cashback site to take the credit. There is evidence to suggest that people just use cashback sites at the point of purchase. The earnings per click for some merchants is up to 5 times higher for incentivised traffic, suggesting that they only go through the cashback site when they are intending to make a purchase. Is it right that affiliates are being denied commissions because of cashback being a more attractive incentive to purchase?
I disagree entirely with: “affiliates are being denied commissions because of cashback being a more attractive incentive to purchase”
And this is bollox too:
“The earnings per click for some merchants is up to 5 times higher for incentivised traffic, suggesting that they only go through the cashback site when they are intending to make a purchase.”
Some cashback sites presell completely, almost to the same extend that the retailers do. It’s the content affiliates that try and get people off their page and a cookie set as soon as possible.
There are far more sales being nicked by Voucher sites than cashback sites.
What’s more, some cashback sites put in just as much hard work to get the sale as any other content affiliate. Granted, 99% of cashback sites out there are white labels to Sub tech, but some are independant and work alot harder than most content affiliates, for alot less of the commission.
Cashback is not a scam when run properly.
Voucher code sites are, but only to the extent of the “click to reveal” and the index spam. Get rid of those and theyd be just as legitimate as any blogger
Everyone is always ragging on everyone else in this industry. “It’s not my fault Im not high in the serps and earning a million, it’s the Cashback sites, Its the Voucher code sites, it’s the PPC”.
Get a grip. Work harder, use your head and you’ll earn more.
I fully agree with what you are saying about voucher code sites. A very large number of these are just trying to force cookies when there is no voucher which can be used.
I also agree that when run properly cashback sites are not a scam. My argument is that sometimes they are taking commission away from the affilate who probably deserves it. For example, if I were on a content site looking at mobile phone reviews and saw an advert for the phone I was after, I may well click on the link. If I decided to go ahead and order the phone, I think everybody would agree that the content site owner should get the commission. However, if I then went through a cashback site before making the purchase, this would not be the case. I am not saying this happens in all cases, but the affiliate who did all the hard work just got nothing for their efforts.
I don’t know of any studies into it, but I would be very interested to know what percentage of cookies set by cashback sites are overwriting a cookie which had already been set for that merchant.