New Zealand Affiliate Programs » Affiliate Programs

IQ Toys Affiliate Program Review

affiliateprograms — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:30:53 +0000

I asked someone independent to have a look over the IQ Toys affiliate program for New Zealand to assess the details and their opinion of it. They came through with something that was a little bit much like a piece of marketing for the program (next time I’ll need to be more clear about being objective) but I thought it was worth posting the details here anyway:

IQToys Affiliate Program

New Zealand’s largest online toy business is IQToys Company. In providing website owners with an incentive to affiliate with them IQToys wanted to be different. They were searching for an easy, efficient way for website owners, companies, and organizations to link IQToys to their own sites and through that affiliation, receive rewards. The toy company management investigated several affiliate programs and finally decided on making things simpler by designing an affiliate program of their own.

Within the IQ Toys affiliate program individuals, companies or organization which wish to become affiliates of the large New Zealand toy manufacturer can find banners, logos, text and videos which are pre-designed for instant use. Individuals, businesses or organizations can simply point and click. Their affiliation seems to be working as applications are pouring in. The toy company is expecting that individuals, parents, parenting and school fundraiser groups will be especially interested.

IQ Toys is a member of the Left Brain Group of e-stores. Located in Mount Naunganui, New Zealand, it is a retail specialist in kids’ games, and educational toys for babies. Besides iQ Toys, the Left Brain Group also owns Baby Universe, I Want That and Gumboot.

IQ Toys was not always the largest toy company in New Zealand. It began as a home business for Suzette and Shane Loomb fifteen years ago. It became one of New Zealand’s first online retail businesses and its first online toy store. IQ Toys has won several awards for excellence in kids’ toys and for its online marketing. In 2000, the toy company won The Netguide Magazine’s award for Best Online Shopping Site (2000). In 2007, IQ Toys was awarded the Deloitte Fast 50 Award for being one of New Zealand’s fifty fastest growing e-businesses. In 2008, it was won the Hitwise Award for being New Zealand’s number one on-line marketer of toys and hobby supplies.

Throughout their rapid climb, IQ Toys has never lost it excitement and passion for bringing its e-customers the finest in toys, games, books, and baby educational materials. Having raised two boys the Loombs remember the excitement and enthusiasm their kids had for favorite toys. They also became specialists in baby gear like car seats, carriages and nursing accessories when their kids were born and added that line to their growing baby care inventory.

Their burgeoning company started with a husband-wife team and has now grown to twelve staff at their New Zealand site and two more at a satellite store in Australia.
What makes customers and staff loyal to IQ Toys is the Loomb’s tendency to treat everyone as a family member.

Here’s how their affiliate program works: By registering at I Q Toys’ online site, you can link your website to their affiliate program. Through this link you can earn commissions of up to ten percent on sales “clicked through” your website. There is no cost to join and signing up and getting linked is easy. You can choose what banners, logos and/or print materials you use from their affiliate site. In less than two days, you can be earning from your enhanced website. Commissions are paid quarterly by check or direct deposit to your bank account. For all sales up to $500, you will earn 7 ½%. For sales between $500 and $1000 you will be paid 8%. Sales over$2500 earn 10% commission for you.

Because IQ Toys have a reputation for being safe, entertaining, educational and durable, the stock sells itself. Many first-time customers become regular shoppers at I Q Toys. It is little wonder that Affiliate Program Review awards I Q Toys Company of New Zealand high points for the excellence of its stock! The affiliate program especially designed by I Q Toys Company is also highly lauded as an outstanding addition to affiliate marketing.

If you have any feedback of your own about the IQ Toys Affiliate Program (http://www.iqtoys.co.nz/affiliates/) then we’d love to hear it, add it to the comments below!

MightyApe Affiliate Program

affiliateprograms — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:14:43 +0000

MightApe (formerly GPstore) run an affiliate program that offers a flat 5% on sale, the ability to purchase from their store directly with the affiliate revenue or transfer the cash into your account without any minimum withdrawal.

Retail affiliate schemes can be difficult at the best of times as there are not a lot of margins available in the products that are sold.

That said, if a retail scheme has high conversion %’s as well as good retention of the customers with a strong customer service focus then that 5% can become valuable when referring a quality purchaser.

What I’m interested in hearing is if anyone has actually used the MightApe affiliate program for New Zealand or not?

I haven’t seen their products being promoted around online in NZ and it’s a pretty small market so I’m assuming their affiliate program is more of a “must have” for their loyal customers as opposed to something that they’re actively promoting to affiliates and looking to use as a strong part of their marketing arsenal.

Here’s an excerpt on their main offer:

How it works

The Mighty Ape Referral Programme entitles you to earn 5% commission on sales that you refer to Mighty Ape via your web site or blog.

Mighty Ape provides you with a unique referral ID to append to links on your web site that point to Mighty Ape.

If a customer visits Mighty Ape by clicking a link that contains your referral ID and places an order, you will receive a 5% commission on the value of the order.

Quoted from the MightApe How it works page.

The key here is “5% commission on the value of the order”.

Does this mean that you’ll only receive 5% on a single order the first time the customer purchases and nothing following that? It isn’t clear if that’s the case so I’ll need to look into it further.

If it is 5% on the first order and no affiliate revenue following that then it’d be a hard ask for an affiliate to promote the service as there’s no hope of recurring revenue for even a limited time. There’s very little chance at 5% on a single order that the affiliate would be able to convert enough customers and sales to create a viable revenue stream for the amount of effort and outlay in traffic generation.

This is of course all a bit of speculation at the moment so I’ll have to see what I can find out about the program before commenting on the actual value to affiliates.

Let me know if you’ve used them in the comments and/or if you’re happy with the service, conversion and setup in general.

UPDATE

Ok, so it’s now confirmed that the 5% on sale is only for the specific item that you linked to and not for the lifetime (or even limited time) for that customer.

Here’s what the MightyApe customer service team said:

If you place a link of one of our products on your site / blog and a customer clicks that link and buys that product you will get 5% commission of that sale.

You will get the 5% commission per each sale that has been referred to us by you.

Unfortunately the commission does not apply if a customer places orders after the referral one.

I’m not clear on how long the cookie will last however with only receiving the 5% from a single sale then it seems like it would be particularly hard for an affiliate to gain enough revenue out of the program to be worth the traffic.

In a scenario like this MightyApe is gaining a purchasing customer who will have a known lifetime value (at least on average) so the 5% which could be a very low number is a massively low % of what the final lifetime value will be.

I’m not suggesting that it should be 5% for the lifetime of the customer as I do believe that would most likely be too much for an online retailer to cut from their margins however I do think this one-off 5% doesn’t represent the value to the affiliate of the acquired customer.

I wonder if they’d be open to CPA deals for known affiliates?

Can you set up affiliate codes as an affiliate?

affiliateprograms — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:17:19 +0000

I’ve just been emailed with a request from an interesting perspective and thought it was worth sharing the response.

Hi there,
here’s my question.
I am a blog/site that recommends products for my readers to purchase. Everything I have read about affiliate programs is written for the “retailers website”. I wish to know if an “affiliate sales tracking thing” can be set up from my end, where I convince the sales website to pay me commission when I send them a sale.
I hope this make sense.

The short answer to the question is sadly a simple “No”.

That said however it’s worth explaining why and what else can be done.

It is of course up a to a retailer to decide whether or not they’re going to offer a retail affiliate program with a commission available for sales that are passed through. This decision is usually a question of margins and whether or not the retailer has a margin that is large enough for both the affiliate and the retailer to earn revenue that is worth the out-lay of effort in generating the traffic to their website.

This tracking takes a reasonable level of technical setup and therefore usually development cost by the retail website to allow for correct tracking right through from the in-bound traffic to the sale to be able to tell exactly where the sale came from. This is something that just can’t be set up by an affiliate from their side.

While there are more and more simple tools that can help to track affiliate sales (Google Analytics can do it in a basic form) there is still a lot of time and effort that goes into the setup and running of an affiliate system.

So, what is the best way to convince a retailer to get involved with an affiliate program?

Talk to them.

Give them a call, let them know you have traffic and you’d like to send it to them and see what they say about it and if they’re not interested in spending the time setting up affiliate traffic tracking, perhaps they’ll be interested in directly paying for the traffic?

If you’ve hit a bit of a brick wall in convincing the retailer to bring tracking online, the last option would potentially be to send through a reasonable level of traffic for free that will generate sales to prove to the retailer that they are going to receive value from your promotion.

Prior to doing this you would of course need to know that the retailer can at least track the referrer of the traffic (e.g. your website) through a statistical package like Google Analytics.

What are affiliates looking for?

affiliateprograms — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:52:15 +0000

Recently I came across an article reporting on a survey of affiliates completed in late 2008.

The main purpose of the survey was to find out what the most important things an affiliate was looking at when joining an affiliate program. They came in the following order;

Commission amount
Product being sold
Brand
Tracking platform
Terms and conditions
EPC
Individuals managing the program
Return days
Action occurences

In addition to the above, the report showed that more than two-thirds of affiliates included the platform the affiliate system was built on in the decision to join.

There is a lot affiliate managers and companies looking to build / launch an affiliate program in New Zealand can take from this specifically regarding the decisions based on platforms available.

Time spent on building a few of the smart features that affiliates who promote internationally (that’s almost all affiliates, including NZ ones) expect to see like custom landing pages, product feeds and detailed reporting tools are one of the key factors in gaining an affiliates belief that your company takes the program seriously and are willing to invest time into building tools for the affiliate.

Finding the right affiliate program for your site…

affiliateprograms — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:40:35 +0000

One of the great things about working online from New Zealand is that we’re already in a local community that’s small and isolated enough from the rest of the world that we’re usually happy to help each other out.

Kotitihaere, a poster in our forums, has come up with some brilliant feedback to both affiliates and affiliate managers in what they, as an experienced affiliate, are looking for when searching around the web trying to find the right affiliate program to promote.

I like the start;

Nothing is more annoying than finding a site in a search engine that has an affiliate program then finding the link to it is a mission in searching!

You can read more on their Guideline for Good Affiliate Programs to sign up to.

Great feedback…

Update on the Adsense Affiliate Program

affiliateprograms — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:06:13 +0000

Google have already back-tracked a bit on the removal of the Adsense Affiliate Program. It looks like they only removed it for certain areas and just assumed that if an affiliate was in a certain location then they were only referring users from that location. Now that’s a pretty basic mistake for any affiliate program to make. In my experience it’s pretty rare that affiliates are only targeting their own local population unless it’s a non-English language site.

From the email;

Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

You can usually read that type of language from any affiliate program as marketing speak for “Half of our affiliates vehemently complained, we admit we screwed up and now we’ve been forced into changing the policy”

That might be a little harsh, Google are doing well to keep the communication lines open to affiliates.

The changes they’ve put forward are;

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

So, one would assume that in countries where they have an overwhelming market share and everyone uses them as the first option for online marketing (this is pretty much how it works in New Zealand with their 95% share) then they’re dropping the affiliate program completely.

Sounds like a pretty solid business decision.

Into 2008; Adsense affiliate program removed

affiliateprograms — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:52:48 +0000

There’s been a bit of a hiatus on posting at the moment due to a new addition to the family of a bouncing little baby girl so affiliate market updates will be a little light for the next few weeks but hold in there as some new developments are in the wind for AffiliatePrograms.co.nz

Fresh into 2008 and Google have announced that they have quashed their affiliate program for referrals to Adsense. Here’s the full text of the email;

Hello,

We are writing to share some important information with you about
referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to
optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we’re
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as
well as tweaking those products already available to our
publishers. This is the case for referral units directing visitors
to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this program
over the past year, we’ve concluded that there are other products
that are of higher value than this program to publishers in your
region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense program will
be retired in the coming weeks. Referrals to other products and
services remain unaffected.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site
directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details
about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, the option to add referral units directing users
to the AdSense product will no longer appear in your account. You
will continue to accrue earnings for all existing referrals yet to
generate $100 until late January, at which point the program will
be fully retired. Existing referral units will continue to appear
on your pages.

By the end of January, you should remove all referral units
directing users to AdSense from your pages. Referral units
that you do not remove will continue to be displayed on your pages
as normal, but conversions will no longer be recorded. We
suggest you replace the AdSense referrals with referrals to
another product or service or an additional ad unit.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We
apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Darn. There are bound to be a lot of people who have many links through-out their sites promoting Google Adsense. It’s a frustrating experience whenever an affiliate program (no matter who it is) completely removes their program.

There have always been questions about this happening and the amount of traffic that the program continues to receive from old links that webmasters have either not found to change or are just never bothered to be updated.

Interestingly, Google appear to have replaced this affiliate program referral to Adsense with advertising Adsense itself through their own Adwords system. I consider it more than a bit questionable to have a company competing with their own clients (particularly in any form of bid system) to promote their own internal products. Very questionable, as the cost is nil to them but may drive up the price for other advertisers who are bidding to show their ads on affiliate related keywords. Perhaps Google should front-up and let the community know if their own Ads on Adsense affect the bids of others?

If anyone has heard of Google talking about this in the past let me know and I’ll update this post.

Blogger offer Adsense per post

affiliateprograms — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:59:43 +0000

Adsense Insider, the Google Adsense Group keeping advertiser up to date with developments has announced that it’s now possible to use a widget inside Blogger to add Adsense following each and every post within a blog;

We’ve heard your feedback about wanting to insert Google ads between your blog posts, and we’re happy to let you know that Blogger now supports this implementation through the AdSense widget.

This would appear to me to be breaking the Adsense terms which limit the number of instances of different formats of Adsense on any one page. If there are many posts on a page I would assume this would mean many copies of the Adsense advert thereby breaking their own conditions?

I have not yet seen the implementation of this so will check it out soon and follow-up to see if this is in fact what Adsense have done.

If it is, it seems like yet another step by Google to giving preferential treatment to people using Google’s own products to the point of breaking terms and conditions.

Google takes on the affiliate market with Referrals 2.0

affiliateprograms — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:30:11 +0000

The New Zealand affiliate market just became a whole lot more interesting.

Google have now fully launched their “Referrals 2.0″ through Google Adsense.

For some time now Google have offered referral fees for promoting their own internal products; Adsense itself, Google Toolbar + Firefox and others. Now they have rolled this Referrals 2.0 product (another name for an affiliate network) out to all Adsense publishers.

There was a beta for the Referrals 2.0 launch in March and now it has launched properly into Adsense accounts with a small advert on the overview page of Adsense saying;

NEW Congratulations, your account has been upgraded to include the all new Referrals 2.0 – click here to get started

Is this relevant to the New Zealand affiliate market? Yes.

On a search for “New Zealand” on the products offered within the Adsense Referrals 2.0 there were 10 results including accomodation programs, flights (of course), rental cars (as expected) and interestingly even Green Lipped Mussels!

This is a major step forward for NZ affiliates but is it the best step forward? Specilised affiliate networks live and die on close, personal communication with their affiliates. Will Google be able to live up to this?

I would think it isn’t a huge focus for Google as they already have the majority of the market in PPC advertising in New Zealand anyway so publishers are bound to flock to them.

So, Google Referrals 2.0 is likely to be an excellent option for lower level affiliates but the top level affiliates (who cover 80% of the market, as usual) may well be cautious on using this system as they will lose the ability for one-on-one deals with the affiliate managers.

Time will tell but Google Referrals is here to stay and will become a dominant force in New Zealand where there is a lack of quality affiliate networks.

What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

affiliateprograms — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:58:26 +0000

I’m happy to introduce the first in a series of four articles on affiliate marketing in New Zealand from a merchant perspective by Antony Ellis, Affiliate Manager for NZ Fine Prints, New Zealand’s largest retailer of art prints and posters; www.prints.co.nz.

The next articles in the series will be;

Where to find New Zealand affiliates
What makes the Merchant – Affiliate relationship work from the Merchant’s perspective, and
What to consider when setting up an Affiliate program for your New Zealand Store – Merchant basics

What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

Why should a New Zealand merchant care about the kind of website that is signing up to their affiliate program?

No retailer wants to set up shop in a shady part of town. They want to associate their brand and products with quality websites. If your affiliate program offers the option merchants should always thoroughly check the content of sites that apply to join their affiliate program. Infringing copyright? Objectionable content? Think hard about whether the extra sales are worth associating your company, brand and products with dodgy looking websites.

Merchants should read the applicant’s “About Us” or “Contact Us” – check who owns the site. If this is not clear try using whois or domainz to look up the owner. It’s hard to trust any site that doesn’t have clear contact and address details. I’m not bothered by the lack of a physical address – many of our best affiliates are run from a home office and don’t want people dropping by as a matter of course – but a contact form with no other details will make a merchant less likely to accept your affiliate application.

If your merchant program includes pay per click think very hard about the signals you pick up from your research. Unless you have sophisticated tools in place to prevent it click fraud may mean paying out more to the affiliate than they deserve. Pay per sale is harder for a dishonest affiliate to fake – but there is always the possibility the site owner is just signing up to get a discount on your products for a one off sale!

A word on expectations. Owners of new websites in particular may have unrealistic expectations of what they can earn in the short term. Let you affiliates know how much traffic your site needs to make a sale (your conversion rate expressed as sales per 100 visitors) so they don’t give up on your program within a couple of weeks if they are not sending through much traffic. Savvy affiliates will also want to know the value of your average sale. Remember that your merchant ads are competing with alternative affiliate programs for screen share on the affiliate’s site so be as open with them as you can – while imagining one of your competitors is reading the email too so you don’t let slip any commercial secrets in you haste to impress an important affiliate!

Merchants – once you have signed up the right kind of affiliate make sure someone in your company is given the job of keeping in touch with them so they send you visitors for many years. It’s hard for a merchant to find quality New Zealand affiliates – a problem that I will explore in my next article.

Learn more about the New Zealand Fine Prints Affiliate Program.

Thank you to Antony for his contribution.

Close communication with the affiliate market is a very important tool for Affiliate Managers to show their commitment to providing value in the industry so I’m glad to see the Fine Prints Affiliate Program is willing to help the community of New Zealand affiliates.

If you have any comments or contributions feel free to contact me on affiliate@nzbase.com.