Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

Till now, we have looked at how profitable affiliate marketing is and what are all its advantages.

But it is equally important for an individual wanting to take up affiliate marketing to know its disadvantages too.

The disadvantages that might cause quite some trouble for a merchant are as follows:

• It is not unfair to call affiliates as good weather friends. When you happen to be a new discovery in the affiliate market, there would not just be curiosity but even delight about what you are offering.

Related: What To Expect From Affiliate Marketing?

But after this initial phase the curiosity would wear off. Once the next business pops in it becomes increasingly difficult for the older ones to retain their business. 

And more often than not, affiliates tend to monitor their earnings quite closely. Not just once or twice a day, but multiple times a day. The serious problem this poses is that, the affiliates will start to get nervous when their earnings do not improve.

And it quite difficult for the earnings to increase on a daily basis for a short duration of time.

It is okay for sales to decrease, but then once it does, a fair number of affiliates would leave the market or move towards better networks and this would affect your growth.

• The share of commissions of affiliates and networks might just take away all your profits.

You might be able to increase your sales by making use of affiliates but then you should also remember that they would wipe out your profits if you weren’t careful.

The commission for affiliates is usually around 5-10% and added on to this you will also have to pay the commission for your affiliate networks if you want to join them.

• As an eCommerce merchant, it might just so happen that your usual profits might suffer, because your sales are being redirected by affiliates. And this might be quite scary.

Related: How To Choose An Affiliate Network Program

As a merchant, you might have had significant amount of sales, even without making use of the affiliates. When you first make use of a certain number of affiliates, it looks like they are bringing in you a lot of sales.

But when you look at the sum total of all your sales, it just looks like it really hasn’t made any difference.

So what could have gone wrong?

It might just be that the affiliate has been able to manage and get the customers to visit your site after clicking a link with the affiliate code.

This should have resulted in a direct sale for you, which is the simple understanding at least.

The reason why this happened is because of the usage of a wide range of methods like SEO, SEM and also the creation of fake coupon codes, the affiliates have managed to get the customer to visit your website but only by clicking on the link of the affiliate alone.

• Affiliates might not even treat your brand with the same respect that you know it deserves. You might have spent a lot of your time and resources to develop a website that meets your requirements.

Some of the common troubles that a merchant would have to endure because of affiliates would be misrepresentation of your offer and they might also distort your brand imagery.

Related: Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

These are minor troubles but would give anyone a bad headache. It is usually the short-term course adopted by these affiliates that causes all this trouble.

Keeping all the troubles aside, affiliate marketing is a great tool. It needn’t be discarded as being useless.

Yes, there are certain pitfalls and therefore it is essential that you are cautious while making use of this tool.

Good luck!

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