Home Overview Merchants / Advertisers Affiliates / Publishers Knowledge Base Contact Us Login Start Merchant Charges Merchant FAQs Affiliate FAQs Glossary Advanced Feeds Report Abuse Merchant FAQs   General Questions What is an Affiliate? What is a Merchant? Are there costs to become a Merchant or an Affiliate of your network? Can anyone become an Affiliate? Can anyone become an Merchant? Can I see a list of the Merchants that are currently on your network? Can I see a list of the Affiliates that are currently signed up to promote your Merchants? Is it possible for us to refuse an Affiliate if we don't want them advertising our product/service? Can we promote our services via your affiliate network, for a commission only fee? My site has nothing that is actually sold on it - is it possible to pay for a specific action on it? It would be useful to see which Affiliates are making me sales, is this possible? Do you offer text links as well as banners? Our site has a Free phone number for customers to call us, will this impact on our Affiliates? What exactly is deep linking and how does it work? We use product feeds within our site can these be used within your Network? How does the 2 tier Affiliate payment work? How many Affiliates do you have at this time, and who else uses your Merchant services? You already have a site similar to mine does this mean you will not accept me as a Merchant? We already use another Affiliate Marketing Network, can we still be Merchants with you? What impact is the long sales cycle (up to 6 weeks) likely to have? I would like to pay Affiliates, for example: 5% on electrical goods and 10% on fashion? I want to be able to offer Affiliates that get a customer the commission for that Merchant for one year and for every sale that customer makes for one year. In other words we need to assign a customer to an Affiliate. Can this be done and how? What will you do to recruit affiliates and what can we do? Startup Questions Can we promote our new site through your network (it is being launched in 4 weeks)? Can you tell me how payments to Affiliates selling my products is made, and in which currency? When setting up a program what do I need to supply you with? Is there a contract and if so is there a minimum period of time that we would have sign up for? Will a freephone number on my site help? Is it useful to promote the fact that I have an Affiliate program? Product Feed Questions What exactly are product feeds and how do they fit in to my affiliate program? What benefits are there in using product feeds? How do I supply you with a content feed and what must they contain? We have many variants of products are we required to include each individual colour and type? Product Price - should this be an inclusive or exclusive VAT price? URL - does this have to go directly to the product - or can it go to the section on the website? Who do I inform of where the feed can be found? How can I keep the affiliates up to date with my products and prices? Creative Questions Where do the banners go and who uses them? Will lots of different banners styles and sizes improve my sales? How many banners can I have to reflect current/different initiatives? How many times can I change them at no cost to me? How many times can I make amendments to the banners you create for me? If additional creative costs then what are the costs? Is there anything I can do from my side in terms of marketing my affiliate program and offering out the banners or should I leave that to the experts? Is there any information available regarding sizes and general help on creating banners? Is there a reason why most of the other Merchant banners don't include the site URL? Pricing Questions Where can I see the costs to become a Merchant? What do I get for my start-up fee? I don't understand what 'the commission guarantee' is? I don't understand what ' the override commission' is? Can we promote our services via your affiliate network, for a commission only fee?   General FAQs What is an Affiliate? (Also known as a Publisher) an Affiliate is a site that is actively promoting the products or services of another company's web site through banners advertisements, advertorial copy or text links. These 'referrals' are tracked and commission paid on sales generated. TOP What is a Merchant? (Also known as an Advertiser) a Merchant is an online retailer who sells their products and services through an Affiliate Network. These companies pay a percentage of their sales income to the Affiliate that initially referred the customer. TOP Are there costs to become a Merchant or an Affiliate of your network? There are no set up fees or monthly charges to become an Affiliate. To see the pricing structure to become a Merchant click here. TOP Can anyone become an Affiliate? Most sites that wish to be a Paid On Results Affiliate can sign up to do so, however the decision as to which Merchants they can advertise on their sites is decided by the individual Merchants. As a Merchant you have the option to review would be Affiliate sites prior to accepting or rejecting anyone as part of your Affiliate sales team. If you wish to allow auto acceptance of Affiliates this can also easily be done through our Merchant Control Panel. TOP Can anyone become an Merchant? We currently reject approximately 80% of the online retailers who apply to become Merchants on our Network. There are several criteria we require new Merchants to meet before we consider accepting them. A checklist of our current requirements is listed here. TOP Can I see a list of the Merchants that are currently on your network and available for me to promote on my site? Yes, a list of our current active Merchants can be seen in our Merchant List. TOP Can I see a list of the Affiliates that are currently signed up to promote your Merchants? No, we have found it impractical to provide a list of Affiliates that have chosen to sell for Merchants as many of our Affiliates prefer to retain confidentiality as to the sites they own. However I can tell you that we currently have in the region of three thousand active Affiliates signed up to sell for our Merchants. TOP Is it possible for us to refuse an Affiliate if we don't want them advertising our product/service? Yes, you have full and final say as to which Affiliates are able to show your banners or link to your site through the system. TOP Can we promote our services via your affiliate network, for a commission only fee? Yes our Affiliates work on a commission only basis, this encourages them to be proactive in promoting their chosen Merchants. TOP I have a site that I would like to promote but there is nothing that is actually sold on it, is it possible to pay an amount for a specific action triggered on it? Yes you can set up a Leads based program paying for actions instead of sales. TOP As a Merchant it would be useful to see which Affiliates are making the sales for me. Is this possible? Yes through our control panel you have a wealth of sales and marketing statistics available to you to help when planning adjustments to specific campaigns. With these you can identify which affiliates are converting well for you and where you should be focusing your marketing efforts. TOP Do you offer text links as well as banners? Yes as well as a wide selection of banners most Merchant sites have text link code provided including the ability to deep link to specific product pages. TOP Our site has a freephone number on it to encourage customers to call us, will this impact on our Affiliates? Yes, this will dissuade Affiliates from advertising you as sales via the phone are not trackable. A common way round this is for you to duplicate your site without the freephone number. TOP What exactly is deep linking and how does it work? Deep linking simply means that a banner or text link on the Affiliates site is set up to take the visitor directly into a specific page other than the home page of the Merchant's site. TOP We use product feeds within our site, can these be used within your Network.? Yes we facilitate the use of product feeds to Affiliate sites and you are able to automatically update your product feed as often as desired. TOP How does the 2 tier Affiliate payment work? This is a payment made to any Affiliates who recruit other Affiliates to a Merchant's program. It is generally a residual commission meaning that the Affiliate will receive payment any time that the 2nd tier Affiliate they have introduced makes a sale. This encourages Affiliates to expand your Affiliate base. TOP How many Affiliates do you have at this time, and who else uses your Merchant services? While we have in the region of three thousand active Affiliates in the UK, it is probably misleading to use this as an indicator of how a program is likely to succeed. You will find that the majority of sales generated through this, (or indeed any Network) will come from a minority of active Affiliates who have highly popular sites within their particular market. A better indicator of how your business will fair through Affiliate marketing would be to send us the URL for the site that you wish to promote. Our experts will asses its potential based on their knowledge of any large Affiliates we have in this market and give you an honest and swift appraisal of your chances of doing well through Paid On Results. TOP I have noticed that you already have a site similar to mine signed up as a merchant. Does this mean you will not accept me as a Merchant? No this needn't be a bar to you being a successful Merchant within the network. Affiliates will often advertise similar merchants within their sites to good effect. TOP My company already sell our products through another Affiliate Marketing Network, can we still be Merchants within Paid On Results? Certainly we are happy for online retailers to work with other Networks as well as our own, and encourage them to compare conversion rates and the fees they are charged to ensure they are getting the best value and service. TOP What impact is the long sales cycle (up to 6 weeks) likely to have? Because your paying an initial lead amount, the impact is going to be very minimal, and the great thing is as your Affiliates start to see additional money coming in for promotional work they have carried out previously, they may well choose to promote your more. TOP I would like to pay Affiliates, for example: 5% on electrical goods and 10% on fashion? Yes we can do this, different levels of commission, can be applied to individual products as well as groups of products, This is done using a product code and applying the relevant commission rates you need to individual products or groups of products. TOP I want to be able to offer Affiliates that get a customer the commission for that Merchant for one year and for every sale that customer makes for one year. In other words we need to assign a customer to an Affiliate. Can this be done and how? Yes this can be done without a problem. What we do is use our Customer Base software and time stamp every customer. Without going in to the full technical details of this we require you to have unique customer information that can be applied to every order. We can supply your technical people full spec on the best way to set this up but it is relatively straightforward and we are happy to help with the implementation. TOP What will you do to recruit Affiliates and what can we do? We will of course contact our own base of Affiliates. Additional to this we will actively source appropriate Affiliates who we feel will work well with the program. As the results emerge from active Affiliates it generally becomes easier to decide who we should target for you. TOP Start Up FAQs Can we promote our new site through your network (it is being launched in 4 weeks)? We can only answer this after the site has been built and we are able to see it. Although we can assist in ensuring that Merchants sales facilities can be integrated easily into our tracking system. To do this it would normally be best to talk to the web site designer prior to the shopping cart being created. TOP Can you tell me how payments to Affiliates selling my products are made, and in which currency? We currently pay by cheque and make all our Affiliate payments in UK £'s sterling. TOP When setting up a program what do I need to supply you with? We require to know the URL/ URL's that you intend to use. TOP Is there a contract we would have to sign and if so is there a minimum period of time that we would have to use Paid On Results? Yes we have a standard contract which has a six month minimum period. The reason for this is because we believe that six months is about the minimum time that a Merchant site will take to start showing results of exposure through our Affiliates. TOP Will a freephone number on my site help? No, a phone number on your site will be detrimental to your program, the reason for this is that Affiliates will not promote a program that encourages the traffic that they send to your site to call a phone number, freephone or otherwise. Phone numbers encourage the visitor to circumvent the tracking used to assign commission and are therefore deeply unattractive to the Affiliate who will generally promote your phone number free competitor over you. This does not mean that your site needs to be free of phone numbers. We recommend that Merchants create a landing page specifically for their Affiliate program. This looks identical to your normal home page only with the phone number removed. By doing this, all traffic sent by Affiliates will not see a phone number while traffic from other sources will. (The exception to the above is a customer care number which is okay as it shows that you have a customer care structure in place). TOP Is it useful to promote the fact that I have an Affiliate program? Yes, we recommend that our Merchants have a link within their site to their affiliate sign up page on our site. This lets potential visitors to your site see that you have a program and will encourage the speedy growth of your program. After all satisfied customers on your site are great potential sales people for you. For a PDF of other tips to kick start your program click here. TOP Product Feed FAQs What exactly are product feeds and how do they fit in to my affiliate program? Product feeds like banners and text links help Affiliates promote your site. Some Affiliates may just stick a banner on their web page, or just use a text link, whilst others will prefer to use a product feed to show products on their web site. Using our advance feed system allows Affiliates to create content for their site based on your products. Having a product feed increases the ways in which an Affiliate can feature and promote you and your product range. Whatever method used by the Affiliate, the visitor goes from the Affiliate to your site. TOP What benefits are there in using product feeds? Affiliates prefer to use product feeds because they are beneficial for maximising sales from their visitors . While some affiliates may just stick a banner on their web page, others may just use a text links conversion. From click through to sale is higher if they use a Merchants product feed. As well as deep linking to the correct product page feeds allow them to create content for their sites based on your best selling products. Having a product feed increases the ways in which they can feature and promote your product range. Many affiliates use our highly customisable feed system to combine products from multiple Merchants into consolidated units on their sites, so creating related product offerings that can be found no where else on the web. Also a product feed is a simple way for them to have auto updated content with minimum effort. TOP How do I supply you with a content feed and what must it contain? Feeds are supplied to us in a CSV format. They should contain essential information such as product price, product name but also usually contain additional information such as a product image sizes, product description. These and many more items can be included in the file including details unique to your products for example for shoes you might have a field for 'shoe brand '. This information can be selected by your affiliates and displayed as desired. To get more info on creating a feed click here TOP We have many variants of products most of which are available in more than one colour - is it required to include each individual colour and type? No the feed only needs to contain one listing per product, so products with different colours or sizes are only listed once. For example, a merchant selling clothing need only list a T-Shirt once and not list each size the t-shirt may come in. TOP Product Price - should this be an inclusive or exclusive VAT price? The Product Price should be the final price the customer pays, so that would be inclusive of VAT. TOP URL - does this have to go directly to the product - or can it go to the section on the website? The URL should go straight to the product page and not a listing page if possible. Also the Image URL for the product should be the biggest image (size wise) you have available and not a thumbnail. TOP Who do I inform of where the feed can be found? If you send the URL of where the feed can be downloaded to feeds@paidonresults.com we will then retrieve it from there. We will also require to know how often the feed is updated to ensure we are making the latest version available to your Affiliates. TOP How can I keep the affiliates up to date with my products and prices? When Merchants provide us with a CSV feed, we recommend they upload a copy of the .csv file to their web site, and keep that updated. We can download the CSV once a week (or even once a day depending on how often its updated). We then deal with updating our database and Affiliates can use our system to keep their content units up to date. A standard CSV file of all your products should contain at least a Product Name, Product Price, Product Description, URL to a Large Image and URL to product. Also in your case I would suggest the Brand Name and Sales Rank (1 for best selling product, 2 for next best selling and so on). If you can provide anything else then the more the better. You need to keep this CSV updated, so we recommend you have it uploaded somewhere and you give us the URL so we can download it once a week for example (or whenever you refresh it). Also a gender field - either M, F or blank (if its for any gender) is a MUST for clothing merchants, also there is a PDF with more technical information on how a product feed works. It can be found here. TOP Creative FAQs Where do the banners go and who uses them? They are made available to all your Affiliates through the control panel which they can access once they have signed up to promote you (if your program is auto accept). TOP Will lots of different banners styles and sizes improve my sales? You can supply as many banners as you like, It should be pointed out that banners are not the main source of sales for most Affiliates, simple text links account for a far greater percentage of sales than banners. This is due to that fact that they are usually included in relevant copy that the Affiliate has written specifically for their audience. For a PDF that includes banner sizes and information on banner formats click here. TOP How many banners can I have – to reflect current/different initiatives? You can have as many banners as you like. Although you would need to supply these yourself. We normally provide 468x60pixel and the 120x60pixel banners for Merchants who need initial help with creative to get them kick started. We do sometimes provide other sizes and additional creative if it is requested and if the program is proving successful enough to warrant it. TOP How many times can I change them at no cost to me? The banners can be changed without charge as often as is required. This is dependent upon you supplying alternatives. TOP How many times can I make amendments to the banners you create for me? We normally allow new Merchants to make all the adjustments they desire (at no cost) provided they are able to identify these within the design cycle which allows two reviews before we are complete. TOP If additional creative costs then what are the costs? Costs for additional creative outside of the terms described above would be charged at £20 per hour for one of our designers to work on these. Normally we would discuss your requests and then give an indication of the time estimated prior to work being triggered. TOP Is there anything I can do from my side in terms of marketing my affiliate program and offering out the banners or should I leave that to the experts? Yes you can promote your program as you see fit although you should be aware that anyone wishing to be an Affiliate for you must sign up through the Paid On Results system (this is free). This is the only way they will get the script required to correctly track visitors that they are directing to you and the only way they will receive any commission that they would have earned. If writing to anyone you should direct them to www.paidonresults.com/affiliates-sign-up.html. TOP Is there any information available regarding sizes and general help on creating banners? Yes, A PDF file is available to view or download which gives you more detailed information on the requirements for banners displayable through the network. It can be viewed here. TOP Is there a reason why most of the other Merchant banners don't include the site URL? Yes, In the Affiliate marketing industry this is a bit of a ‘no no' from the Affiliates point of view. Their concern is that any interested viewer may just type in the URL rather than clicking on the banner. We would therefore strongly recommend that if you wish maximum uptake of your banners by Affiliates that you omit the .com or .co.uk. TOP Pricing FAQs Where can I see the costs to become a Merchant? All pricing for Merchant services can be seen by clicking here. TOP What do I get for my start-up fee? The set-up fee is a one off payment that we charge to cover the cost of actual integration of your site into the network. This involves generating tracking codes and completing test sales, setting up your description page and addition of your business to the Merchant directory. Part of this process is an overall review of your site to ensure you are ready for affiliate marketing. This may include discussing improvements to your site for affiliates, taking you through creating your first product feed or improving an existing feed. We also offer guidance on banner creation and will where applicable supply you with banners. TOP I don't understand what 'the commission guarantee' is? Essentially it is a float held by the network to ensure that you are always in funds. This allows us to pay your Affiliates for the sales they have already made for you. When 50% of your agreed float is spent on commission for sales made you will automatically be issued with a top up invoice. Using this system ensures you are always in the black and has the positive effect of encouraging Affiliates to promote you in the knowledge that should your business suddenly go under or you decide not to continue on the network that sales made to that point will be honoured. TOP I don't understand what 'the override commission' is? This is the commission payable by the Merchant to the Network as the result of a concluded sale by an Affiliate. This is a percentage figure which is an industry standard across networks. TOP Sign up Now It's quick and it's easy. Join as an Affiliate partner > Join as a Merchant partner >  Related Sections Affilliate FAQs Affilliates testimonials Affilliates top tips  Merchants Merchants FAQs Merchant testimonials Merchants pricing Merchants top tips Top Tips for Success Find out how to get serious and start realising the power of the web to make you money. Find out more > How we stay ahead of the pack Read what some of the UK's top Affiliates and Merchants say about our system. Find out more > Our Merchants Just some of the webs best Merchants who partner with us. Affiliate Programs >

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