Affiliate Marketing

Linkshare announced this morning that they will start paying their affiliates on a weekly basis effective immediately. They are attempting to improve on what has been a weakness of their affiliate network for a long time: delayed and poorly organized payments.

Unlike Commission Junction, Linkshare allows its advertisers to pay their affiliates directly or to pay through their system. This is problematic for an affiliate who manages hundreds of merchant relationships. Linkshare sends out its consolidated checks, but then specific merchants send out separate checks on their own schedule.

My main gripe with Linkshare payment system has been that they allow merchants 90 days to review each and every transaction before they are considered final and closed. Commission Junction on the other hand gives merchants 10 days after the end of each month to review transactions from the previous month. Only if a merchant is unable to verify a specific transaction within this time period are they allowed to “extend” the review period to 90 days. Both Linkshare and Commission Junction allow 90 day review periods but CJ defaults to the shorter period of 10 days, while Linkshare defaults to 90 days. Basically, CJ is more affiliate friendly than Linkshare. Linkshare is more merchant friendly.

Does this weekly payment system change all that? I see no indication that is does. Linkshare wins some points for trying to improve on one of their network weaknesses, but until they default to a shorter review period, I will prefer CJ’s payment system. I actual appreciate the once monthly payments CJ provides. They are easy to keep track of and I don’t feel like I am losing commissions I may have earned 3 months ago but don’t have time to keep track of. This problem is exacerbated by recent reporting outages at Linkshare that continue as of this date. 

Linkshare still has some work to do to make themselves more affiliate friendly. In the meantime CJ merchants will get more attention than they deserve because of the network they have chosen.

A bit of advice to Linkshare merchants: If you don’t want to move to CJ but you want to make your program affiliate friendly, then make sure you approve the previous month’s affiliate transactions within the first 10 days of the month. This effectively equalizes the issue, and perhaps even works in Linkshare’s favor because of the new weekly payment system.