Pharmacy Direct Company, NZ, is an online New Zealand e-business. Since 1997, it has been delivery quality products to customers all over the world from its New Zealand depot in Northcote, Auckland.

Pharmacy Direct is an [...]]]> Tried another friend this time to write a guest review about Pharmacy Direct. Here’s what he came up with:

Pharmacy Direct Company, NZ, is an online New Zealand e-business. Since 1997, it has been delivery quality products to customers all over the world from its New Zealand depot in Northcote, Auckland.

Pharmacy Direct is an online pharmacy but much more than that. Besides prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs, Pharmacy Direct also supplies millions of satisfied customers which such items as: health and beauty aids, weight loss products, sexual health products, fragrances, contact lens, baby and childcare products, and natural products.

Since its inception in the late 1990’s it has been the company vision of PharmacyDirect to deliver to its e-customers a wide range of health and beauty products of the highest quality in New Zealand and the most appealing prices in the country. Judging from its many returning clients, PharmacyDirect has made good on its promise of inexpensive, reliable service and outstanding customer service.

Customers of Pharmacy Direct appreciate the fact that they do not need to shop at retail stores or price compare. Their drugs, health and beauty items are delivered efficiently to their door at prices that cannot be beat in line with PharmacyDirect’s “best price guarantee”. In addition to
Prices guaranteed to be the lowest anywhere, Pharmacy Direct also offers its Rewards on everything excluding prescription. Trained, knowledgeable sales representatives are only too happy to answer questions regarding PharmacyDirect’s over-the-counter health and beauty products. So whether your condition is short or long term and whether it is an allergy or an age spot, hay fever or a hair condition, PharmacyDirect’s friendly staff will answer your questions about any condition from asthma to heart disease. Many clients rely on PharmacyDirect Company’s expertise whether they are at home, at work, on the road or on an around-the-world cruise. You are never more than a click or a phone call away from PharmacyDirect’s experienced staff.If you have any questions or concerns please contact our customer service team on customerservice@pharmacydirect.co.nz or phone our customer services team, toll free 0800 PHARMACY (0800 742 762).

PharmacyDirect’s Direct Affiliate Program has won high marks from New Zealand’s Affiliate Program Review. By linking your individual, company or organization website to PharmacyDirect’s Affiliate Program, you can earn commission every time a sale is made by clicking through your website. This affiliate marketing opportunity is an excellent way for individuals to earn from a secondary income or for schools, hospitals and other organizations to fund raise. Here’s how it works. Once you have linked the website of your company, organization or your personal website to PharmacyDirect’s Affiliate Program, you will start to earn five percent for every sale clicked through your website. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it’s for real! All you need to do is choose banners, logos, text from PharmacyDirect’s Affiliate Program. You may also add endorsements of PharmacyDirect’s products and/or services to increase sales appeal. Then, you sit back and watch sales come in!
To register your individual business or organization website, simply click on the New Application link, and submit your application. Pharmacy Direct staff will review your application for affiliation and provide details about how to become an affiliate if your website is accepted. Once you become an affiliate, you can check on commission payment information and affiliate updates by logging in to the Pharmacy Direct website.
Affiliate marketing has become big business not only for New Zealand companies but throughout the world. The more business and Internet savvy a webmaster is, the more likely his website will generate affiliate commission revenue. That’s why companies like PharmacyDirect have opted to create their own Affiliate Programs. As noted in New Zealand’s Affiliate Program Review, Pharmacy Direct Affiliate Program is easy to link and use and provides colorful banners, logos and interesting text which website owners may access to enhance their website affiliate marketing.

Let me know if you find anything in there that isn’t correct or if you have direct experience with their affiliate program.

Retail affiliate schemes can be difficult at the best of times as there are not a lot of [...]]]> 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?

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 [...]]]> 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.

A big part of the problem was [...]]]> Ok, it’s been a long time coming (more than a few months since the last post) and apologies to the community and readers for the hiatus but as you may see from some design changes of late, we’re going through a big update to get things back on track.

A big part of the problem was that AffiliatePrograms.co.nz was running on a very old and unstable version of WordPress which needed a lot of background work to get it back online. That background work has now happened and while there’s a bit of work to do to bring back our lovely green branding, we’re now happily running on the swish latest stable of WordPress 3.0.1.

The Affiliate Forum still needs a bit of work as it’s stuck in the dark ages of phpBB but we can report that the spam which was turning up on there is no longer going to happen!

Last but by no means least, the New Zealand Affiliate Programs List is being updated over the month of August to check that the programs are still live. If you’re reading that list you’ll find a point half-way down where it shows that the affiliate programs above that line have been checked to be live and current.

Again, thanks for your patience if you’re a reader from some time ago and if you’re new to affiliate marketing in New Zealand have a look around the older posts via the category pages and you’ll find lots of interesting discussion about local affiliate programs.

If you have any feedback about what programs are no longer live on the list mentioned above, just add them to the comments below this post and they’ll be updated in August.

Good luck with your promotions!

Gary, AffiliatePrograms.co.nz

As you’ll most likely know, affiliate programs are all about gaining advertisements (or links) from other websites through to your own to promote [...]]]> I’ve had some spare time while out of the office and have been reading a couple of interesting posts on work people have completed surrounding building affiliate programs that pass SEO weight.

As you’ll most likely know, affiliate programs are all about gaining advertisements (or links) from other websites through to your own to promote your product.

What you may not have considered is what affect this could have on the SEO for a company if the affiliate program is designed in such a way that all of the in-bound links to the website being promoted are also passing SEO weight.

As a side note, generally Google frowns on allowing advertising from one website to another to pass page rank (if you don’t know what that is, have a read about page rank although if you’re reading this I’m sure you do).

Here’s one post from 3DogMedia from some time ago that describes it quite well. Basically, if you give affiliates static URL’s that they can promote your product through (e.g. http://yoursite.com/affiliateid/) then they’re linking directly to your site on a link that Google can track and pass SEO weight for.

There’s also a post from Stephan Spencer around that describes this with the focus covering the need to make sure that the links used are also 301′s (permanent redirects) so that the search engines know the weight should pass to the resulting page (e.g. the homepage).

Overall the above posts cover some good advice if you’re looking at running your own affiliate program and have the ability to select the URL structure that the program runs on. It’ll help pass SEO weight to your site and is a more user-friendly structure anyway.

It’s a good question so I thought I’d post the Q & A here;

Good morning Gary,

I live in Whangaparaoa and I am [...]]]> This morning I was asked if there is any direct affiliate coaching in New Zealand available to help someone who is interested in getting into affiliate marketing as a supplementary income.

It’s a good question so I thought I’d post the Q & A here;

Good morning Gary,

I live in Whangaparaoa and I am interested in learning about Affiliate marketing as a means to earn a supplementary income.

Are there people you know of close to me who are into Coaching people like me?

Regards

XXXX  XXXX

Stanmore Bay
Whangaparaoa

Here’s my response;

Hi XXXX,

I’m afraid there is very little in the way of direct coaching for affiliate marketing in New Zealand.

The best I can suggest is online research and getting involved in forum communities to ask as many questions and read as many answers as you can.

One thing to note is that there isn’t any need to buy any services (e.g. e-books) related to affiliate marketing strategies / tools.

In my opinion you can find anything you need to know that will be in those books elsewhere online on an affiliate resource site or by chatting in forums.

Good luck with it.

Regards

Gary

Hopefully the forum poster doesn’t mind me answering the question regarding Affiliate Merchants here;

I just joined the affiliate program forum a [...]]]> There was a simple but often overlooked question in our Affiliate Forum over the last week that I thought deserved a post to help others out with their searching as well.

Hopefully the forum poster doesn’t mind me answering the question regarding Affiliate Merchants here;

I just joined the affiliate program forum a couple of days ago and I am completely new to this whole business. I am very interested and would be very grateful for any help regarding this concept. I am in the process of developing a web site related to the Travel sector in NZ. (Accomodation, Tours, Attractions, Rentals etc.).
Please forgive my ignorance in all this (as evident in the next couple of questions), but there is a saying in Spanish which translates to : “It is better to be really red with embarrassment only once than to be bright pink a hundred times”.

I know which merchants I would like to have an affiliate relationship with, (their seriousness, reliability, reputation, solid business practice etc.) but when I go to their web page I don’t find any link to affiliate programs. Does this automatically mean that they don’t have one? Or there is one but it’s not advertised and one must contact them personally? If I want to include a link on my site about “campervan rentals” I can understand if “Joe’s Rent-a Dent Camper Hire” doesn’t have an affiliate program but the major players?

Is there a site which gives me a list of affiliate programs in my particular field? Have contacted NZ Tourism but no joy there so far. As I mentioned before, very grateful for any sort of assistance.

Most websites or businesses that have an affiliate program will have an “Affiliate Program” link somewhere on their homepage. As it sounds like you’ve done, that’s the first place to look.

If they don’t have that link but you’re sure they a program, your next option is to do a search on the affiliate programs that have joined a few of the different networks that provide for the NZ affiliate market.

The obvious examples are clixgalore.co.nz, commissionmonster.co.nz and dgmpro.com. You could also have a look at the US networks like CJ.com which often have the larger international brands and may allow promotion to the New Zealand market. There are other networks that are limited regarding which affiliates can join as well e.g. tpn.co.nz.

Last option is to send the branded website you’re looking to promote an email through their standard contact form although this can have varying responses. Where you can, try and email a marketing contact at the branded site as often a general support team will not know what an affiliate program is…

Good luck finding the affiliate program you’re looking for!

The affiliate newsletter is commonly under-utilised when, done well, it can be one of the better means [...]]]> The most regular means of communication between affiliate managers and the wider group of affiliates in their program is generally going to be the affiliate newsletter, otherwise known as CRM (customer relationship management) if you’re the affiliate manager.

The affiliate newsletter is commonly under-utilised when, done well, it can be one of the better means of building a community around a program.

If your an affiliate, it is important to make sure you’re signed up to the affiliate newsletter for your best performing (or most sophisticated) programs as this is going to be your quickest way of keeping up to date with whatever is new in the program and potentially give you tips and insights into what is going to perform best for you as you work with the program.

Affiliate managers should understand that the affiliate newsletter is the second most important tool in keeping an affiliate community up to date with what’s happening in the business. The first is, without doubt, shouting the affiliate a beer at the bar during an affiliate conference

Affiliate managers who are looking to build a community will often find a way to get more into the newsletter than just the latest promotion. Whether it’s a featured piece about a top affiliate, the best performing product that they have or ideas surrounding the next meet up of like-minded internet geeks, you should be receiving a newsletter that helps you interact with the program and learn ways of improving the ROI of your time spent promoting their program.

If you’re not receiving tips from your most preferred or profitable affiliate program (they’re not always the same) then you should be talking to your affiliate manager to start getting them more involved with building your community and potentially even offering to help.

Who knows, you may get some good contacts out of helping out.

As much as affiliates can feel like they’re out on their own in the world and don’t want to pass on any secrets of their performance, there are many situations where getting involved and helping the community as a whole will help lift the affiliate program you’re working with thereby improving your bottom line and hopefully enhancing your affiliate knowledge.

The discussion [...]]]> I watched the Google Wave presentation recently and aside from getting a few laughs from the speakers crashing the sandbox version of the new open source Google Wave project it really does look like it has the potential to change online messaging or more specifcally change the online collaborative documentation offering.

The discussion elements available as part of collaboration on a specific document (including stunning multiple editing features) seems to set it apart from others in a way the industry hasn’t really gone down yet.

Will it revolutionise the messaging (email / IM) industry?

Who knows, there are too many factors to inlcude in that call at this point.

Will it take over the existing online document collaboration elements available?

I would think so.

The real question at this point is how much weight are Google going to put behind it? If they go hammer and tong force feeding people out of Gmail and into Wave then there’s going to be a lot riding on it.

Watch the presentation yourself and comment on what you believe it will change…