Is an Affiliate Program right for your Small Business?

Our small business is constantly working toward finding the perfect balance between offering our customers amazing deals and keeping our business in the green. We're always experimenting with different ideas, and one thing we tried over the last two years was an affiliate program. Well, we recently discovered a way that big coupon/promo code websites are taking advantage of this system which is why we had to end our program. Read on to decide if an affiliate program is right for your small business.

The cloth diaper industry is in what some might call a slump right now. I'm not sure if it's limited to cloth diapers, or if small retailers in general are struggling to keep up with the big guys like Amazon and Walmart. I feel like it's probably more of the latter because cloth diapers as a whole have made some great strides toward becoming more mainstream over the years. But as a retailer myself, I've had to come up with some pretty creative ways to promote our online cloth diaper shop to the masses without getting lost in a sea of Amazon links. As you can imagine, this hasn't always been easy and we are constantly learning from our experiences.

One of the things we set up a while back was an affiliate program. Basically, we had lots of bloggers reaching out to us wanting to promote the Spray Pal cloth diaper sprayer and splatter shield, so we wanted to give them a way to make some sort of commission off of their work. They could sign up on our website and share their personalized link, and when a customer clicked their link and made a purchase they would get a 5% commission back to them for helping us spread the word. We really hoped this would be a great win/win situation for the influencers who were helping us spread the word and for our brand in getting our name out there. It sort of just ran on autopilot without any issues until just a couple weeks ago when I opened my inbox early one morning in February.

I opened an email from someone who had signed up as an affiliate on our website back in Fall of 2017. It was basically a form letter, and it was asking how we preferred to pay them their sales commission. We could request an invoice from them or we could just autopay a certain amount each month in advance. This took me off guard because as I mentioned, the affiliate program had been on autopilot, and no one had used any one link frequently enough to require a monthly payout (the minimum payment amount is $50 before the system will cut a check to the influencer). So I went into the backend of our website to see how often her link had been used since she signed up in October, and wouldn't you know our affiliate traffic had DOUBLED via this particular link.

Normally, I would have been ecstatic to have an influencer promoting our brand SO MUCH that we were gaining this many new customers via her recommendations and blog posts. But, here's what happened. I quickly googled their company website and Spray Pal to see what wonderful things she had been saying about our products, and here's what I found:

The orange "activate coupon" tabs you see there? Can you guess where they lead? Directly to our website. Via this company's personal affiliate link. Does it activate the coupon that they are claiming it will activate? No, it does not. So basically this a huge scam intent on misleading our customers into clicking their affiliate link so they get a 5% commission on each sale, even though they did NOTHING to promote our brand or talk about our products.

After realizing this tangled web of lies, I did a little more digging into who had actually used this affiliate link on our website because I thought, "Well, hey. If it's bringing new people into the site and turning them into customers, that's great!" But guess what. The people who had used the link were ALREADY our customers. They were people I recognized via interactions on social media. And I want to be clear, I'm not upset at these customers AT ALL. They did exactly what I MYSELF always do when I'm online shopping and I see an empty box at the checkout that says "Enter Promo Code" - I always do the google search. Open a new tab, search for Spray Pal promo code or coupon, land on this website pictured above, and click "activate coupon." WE ALL DO IT. And I never realized before this incident that so many of these sites will just take old coupons and post them with an affiliate link that leads to nothing but the website just to get people to click through and earn them money.

So, I've emailed this company back and told them that I will only pay them the commission for those customers who were brand new to our website when they used their link to purchase. And that effective immediately we will no longer offer an affiliate program. I'd rather use that money to offer you all discounts and promos like reward points directly than pay a company to run a scam that's unfair to you as a consumer and us as a small business.

And if you all wouldn't mind helping us spread the cloth diapering love and tagging us our sharing our links in the meantime, you know we'll love you for it. ;) Thanks for being so awesome and supporting our small, family run business!