Affiliate Program

[BRobinsonS]

I often wondered why Neosoft doesn't have an affiliate program for NeoBook and Neopaint.
I certainly would like to promote Neobook on my websites beyond the Logo.

[Neosoft Support]

We would love to have you help promote and sell NeoBook, and its been a while since we looked at affiliate programs so things may have changed. In the past, the primary reason that we haven't had an affiliate program is that we would have to turn our order processing over to a third party in order to facilitate payment to affiliates. We've used third party order processing in the past with poor results. The primary problems with third party order processing are 1) it's very difficult for us to help OUR customers resolve problems related to individual orders; 2) income/profit significantly reduced by fees charged by third parties; 3) increased theft, fraud and charge-backs as third party doesn't care or isn't able to scrutinize suspicious orders. If you have a ton of orders and don't care if a certain percentage get screwed up or are fraudulent then having someone else handle order processing can work. The advantage of third party processing is that orders can be processed and delivered instantly, however this also greatly increases the potential for fraud (see #3 above).

If there is another way to create an affiliate program without using a third party order processor, we can look into it. However, making micro payments to dozens of individual affiliates, dealing with returns, taxes/withholding, etc. ourselves would not work.

[krackerjaxz]

A self-hosted solution could be iDevAffiliate. There's other affiliate software out there but that's the first that comes to mind. With iDevAffiliate affiliates could have their own control panel to access their statistics, etc. It supports multiple payment gateways.

As for returns, etc... Each company has their own way of handling returns and affiliate credit. The most popular is a payment window. Let's say the window is from the 15 of one month to the 15 of the next month. So, June 15 to July 15 is a window. All sales for that window are accrued. But payment is not made until the following month. This takes in to account a 30-day time frame for any potential returns/refunds. This way the seller (NeoSoftware) isn't paying money to affiliates on merchandise that was refunded to the buyer.

In regards to processing payments, that's all up to Neosoftware. Orders could still be manually processed. The only thing iDevAffiliate (or other affiliate tracking software) would do is keep track of sales made for that particular affiliate ID.

I'm not sure what micro payments are. However, if it simply means small payments, then that's easy to overcome. Just about every affiliate program that I've seen has a threshold. That is, payments (whether via check, PayPal, or whatever payment system is being used), are not made until the affiliate has reached a certain amount. So Neosoftware could set the amount of $50 or $100. By the time the next payout is done, if the affiliate hasn't accrued at least $50 or $100, then their balance will roll over to the next payment cycle.