Depending on the merchant that you promote, we typically see that between one in six to one in ten sales involve multiple affiliates. Generally, this doesn’t mean another gear review site as you’ve suggested above- this typically means a coupon, loyalty or shopping portal coming in after your referral. In this scenario you would get no credit for that sale. Let me restate that as it seems to be the key point that’s missing in this dialog: in this scenario you would get NO credit for that sale.

Put very frankly and straightforward, for every 6-10 sales you make as an affiliate, you’re not receiving commission on 1 because of affiliate referrals after yours.

This isn’t something that’s up for debate. This is fact sourced from from many years of data. The argument that we don’t care about smaller publisher is completely off base. Commission sharing is in place precisely because smaller content publishers are demanding to still receive compensation when they have to compete with the far bigger websites that typically “close” a sale.

A final thought- this technology exists because there was explicit demand from both merchants and affiliates. Small, content affiliates like yourself. As you mentioned in a prior comment, there are still merchants who have chosen not to implement this technology yet and therefore plenty of opportunity to work with them if you’re so inclined to oppose commission sharing. That said, the merchants that you are working with have chosen to use this technology because of the benefits it is providing to their other small content affiliate partners.

“Allows for multiple affiliates involved in a sale to receive compensation for their involvement in a sale.” Most of the equipment I review is not being reviewed by other sites. So I doubt anyone has read another review from an AvantLink publisher talking about the gear we review. So that part doesn’t matter to me.

“Helps merchants optimize their relationships with affiliates like you” pretty sure my partners know what we are doing in terms of sales, branding and ROR.

“Checkout Influencer: Affiliate referrals that sends a visitor that is currently in the checkout process on the merchant’s website (20% of the commission).” – these seem to be what hits me the most. Again Patagonia here. Someone is in the checkout process.. not sure if they want to make a purchase so They go back to Google do a search and find a review, read the review and say yes I will buy now by clicking a link on the review page. They go back to Patagonia make the sale say $100 bucks and I get 20% commission of an already low commission rate of 10%. Whats the math here $2 commission?

I have never felt AvantLink cared about small publishers. We know you make the bulk of your money with coupon sites not content. You charge brands and seem to signup just about anyone these days to be in the program. You have numerous merchant contacts listed for programs that do not respond to emails. Heck you still have Teton Gravity Research and a contact in the system that hasn’t been employed with them in over 4 years? And the program has been shutdown for years toboot. https://www.avantlink.com/programs/11793/teton-gravity-research-affiliate-program

If there are any publishers that are for shared attribution please comment or contact me directly. Maybe I am seeing this wrong. However since you rolled this program out I am losing money on commissions, not earning more as you seem to imply.

Mike- Your comment wasn’t blocked. You made it on a Friday night during a holiday weekend and approve didn’t happen until today.

Your response indicates that it might be helpful to learn more about attribution technology, to which I’ll defer to our affiliate overview document: https://info.avantlink.com/hubfs/Content_Offers/Affiliate%20Attribution%20Overview/Affiliate%20Marketing%202.0%20-%20What%20It%20Is%20&%20How%20It%20Benefits%20Affiliates.pdf

Who does this benefit? The big guys. Who is going to get hosed, the bloggers, the actual influencer’s. It hurts the little guy. Imagine if Amazon.com used the 40% Influencer payout model that AvantLink has. Blogger spends time and money writing article. Someone comes and reads the article. Clicks on affiliate link to Amazon.com and makes a purchase, instead of getting 100% of the commission. They would now only receive 40% if someone had previously visited Amazon.com. Hmm wonder if anyone’s ever been to Amazon.com before?

Out of 600+ merchants in AvantLink, 20 of your merchant partners run shared attribution. Again I ask who does this benefit? Is this a way for merchants to save money by not paying out commissions? Or am I missing something?