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Tuesday March 28, 2006

Commission Junction

I was updating some of my web pages and found out that buy.com had lower prices on some items than Amazon. Sometimes the difference was pretty significant so I thought it wouldn't be right to avoid linking to buy.com just because I get a commission at Amazon. But of course that made me wonder if buy.com had an affiliate program. Turns out they do, but they run it through a third party called Commission Junction. That company has a bunch of other advertisers as well, so you can promote all kinds of different things, but the commissions are lower (3%) than Amazon. I decided to sign up since it is free anyway.

The sign-up was kind of a pain. I had to agree to three different screens of terms and conditions. I don't think I had anything like that with Amazon. So right off I was a little put out with them. I only link to about three things at buy.com and they aren't the big sellers that I link to Amazon, so the bottom line is I have only gotten a handful of clicks and no purchases so far. During the same period Amazon has been pretty slack as well, so I will give them a couple of more weeks, but if it doesn't look like I'm going to make much of anything I think I will get out of the program and link to buy.com products anyway.


Comments (1)

After signing up on March 20, I haven't made a single sale with buy.com. With only a 3% commission and 3 product links it was going to take a while to ever make anything decent, so I changed my buy.com links to direct links. I figure what very little I might have been able to make would be offset by search engines seeing yet another ad source (I already have AdSense and Amazon) on my page and potentially ranking my site lower. Meanwhile, sales of Amazon products have become much more sporadic lately. March must have been an unusually strong period.

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