eSnipe affiliate program under consideration: get paid to bring your friends to eSnipe?
We are considering an eSnipe affiliate program. It’s one of those deals where we pay you a chunk of money if you point someone to eSnipe and they become paying customers.
It would work something like this. We supply you with a special URL. You put it up on your website (or email it to people on your mailing list). If the person clicking the link creates a new account and eventually purchases with us, then you’d get, say, $10, or perhaps 75% of their first purchase.
Companies that seem to have the affiliate program down include Commission Junction, Paydotcom, and Clickbank. These companies do nothing but manage affiliate programs for others, which reduces the possible errors that might crop up if you create an affiliate program of your own. It also makes many other tasks, such as technical support and database management, easy for the company using the affiliate program. We would almost certainly use such a third-party site to administer the affiliate program for eSnipe.
There are some complicating factors, namely that you don’t get paid for up to 6 weeks after you’ve referred a customer. Heh, you ask?
The reason for the exceedingly long wait time is fraud control. First off, we have a 2 week free sniping period. Second, we have a 30 day money-back guarantee. That’s 6 weeks total. If we paid as soon as someone bought BidPoints, what’s to stop them from obtaining a refund immediately after we’ve paid out the referral cash? I want to stay married, so there’s not going to be an immediate payout. So 6 weeks it is.
Another issue to deal with is payout. I assume most people would want cash. I could also do it in BidPoints, maybe offering twice the value in BidPoints as cash. So instead of $10 cash, you’d get 2,000 BidPoints. Just a thought.
Have any feedback on this idea? Please post a comment if you do. I’d love to hear about it.
Cheers,
Tom Campbell
And to think that I have been getting you new Snipers for free all these years (Charter member).
Pay in bid points would be fine – double would be better.
Wait 6 weeks – yes – I see why that would be necessary. If I were not the patient type, then I would do only “Buy it now.”
You would also need some way to redeem credit for “face to face” referrals where the person is sent to Esnipe.com to sign up. That is how most of my referrals have been done.
Sharon
@Sharon, thanks for the feedback. I like the face to face referral idea. Why not just send us their email address, and if you’re the first one to do so, you’re qualified? We’d have a Face to Face form to sign up from within your own eSnipe dashboard.
Sounds like a good idea. I’ve had a link to esnipe on my site for years now, just because I think it’s a really cool idea. Now, I’m not sure if anybody has signed up, but I would think that there are probably a couple. I also face-to-face tell people of your site and know for a fact that probably 10 or so have signed up.
Wait period – no problem
bidpoints v. cash – Cash is always nice, but double bidpoints would be keen as well.
My $0.02 – hope it’s useful.
-Greg
@Greg. Thanks for the link. Is it advproducer.com? Let’s trade links, dude! Post it up here or email me at eom atsign easyonme.com. And yes, your 4 BidPoints were useful!
Cash is King where I come from. Six weeks to wait for money is no big deal, I’ve waited longer, just as long as it comes. Getting paid for “Face to Face” referrals would be cool too.
Jaysen
@Jaysen, I’d be feeling the same thing. We will of course have a cash option. Interesting that the double-the-bidpoints version is more popular. Thanks for the feedback.
Cheers,
Tom Campbell, CEO
eSnipe, Inc.
I asked about a white label version of eSnipe for the UK audience two years ago and followed it up last year, both times nobody got back to me…
An affiliate program would be good as would the offer of country specific options in language and currency specific to the browser / user detection. At the moment I use eSnipe regularly but bidding on UK Ebay we see links to US Ebay, could do with some tags in the url to get this right and that would lead nicely into white label.
I still have that five letter TLD waiting on a snipe project for the UK.
@Dave, let’s talk. Sorry this fell through the cracks. Thanks for your patience. Try me at eom atsign easyonme.com.
I requested this 4 or 5 years ago and would still welcome it. I already have an esnipe referal link in my eBay listings. I would just have to change where it sends the click. Double bid points sounds great, with the possiblity of changing bid points to 1/2 value in cash if the number gets excessive (in excess of 25,000 maybe)
Have always enjoyed using the site and look forward to buying more items using it.
MacBob
A further though about Jaysen’s face to face referal is to have a refered by blank in the sign up page and use the referee’s email address there.
Hang In.
Hello, My comment on people JUST SENDING you EMAIL ADDRESSES and the First to Send you ‘so and so’s address’ gets the sign up referral fee has A FEW MAJOR PROBLEMS…. FIRST and Mainly, that people can go and purchase any number of email addresses and names from sales companies and send them to you. Then when a TRUE REFERRER sends you someone’s email address and name they are generally already ‘Out of the Picture’…. and SECOND, my own little green eyed portion of self creeps out thinking “Why do I want to refer Bidding Competition to you, the Wonderful, Terrific esnipe website, that helps me get lower priced buys that make it EASY FOR ME TO RESELL and make a WHOLE LOT MORE than I would by getting referral money????” Comments?
@Dr.HopeToHelp, all good feedback. There are third parties that have worked out most of the kinks in affiliate programs like this and I would use one of them. And as far as your green-eyed self, boy, you aren’t kidding. Here’s the paradox of eSnipe: we don’t advertise anywhere. All of our business comes from word of mouth. Yet we do get new customer referral every day. I think the reason is that we still only account for a small fraction of 1% of eBay’s total bids.
I’m known as the “ebay guru” (hardly, but one can dream) in my office and have referred many people to esnipe (no-one I know buys in my niches) so an affiliate program would be wonderful. $$$ are great but bidpoints would also be welcome. A six week wait for cash is no biggie. There are plenty of things that take that (or longer) to come to fruition. Hope this helps.
Cheers
Anna
@Anna, this is helpful. Thank you. Thanks too for spreading the word. I really appreciate it.
Cheers,
Tom Campbell
If you are not familiar with it, Big Ticket Depot, a totally new online auction business, incorporates an affiliate program for “brokers” who are supposedly then going to be able to collect commissions by helping sellers move big ticket items priced US$1K and more. It’s taken longer than originally indicated to finally get the Big Ticket Depot auction site up and running (which it is now), but in the meantime Joel Sauceda, the founder, also got the Big Value Depot auction site online for people to bid on, buy and sell whatever they fancy.
@Iago, what with your URL and the slightly off-topic subject matter I think I sniff some internet marketing via blog commenting. I bet you have an affiliate URL or 10 somewhere on your blog. Why not? Happy to give a fellow IM’er a plug
Use bidpoints. Easier and better.
Mary Lou
@Mary Lou: Thanks for the feedback. That will absolutely be an option.
Cheers,
Tom Campbell
I like the affiliate idea. Why not offer a choice of either a small cash payout or BidPoints? I like using Esnipe–in fact, I use it pretty much every single time I need to make a purchase on eBay. But, that’s not saying much. I don’t really buy tons of things on eBay anymore. As such, there will be times when I’d probably rather have a little cash, as opposed to BidPoints. But, some kind fo payout is a good idea for referring new customers, because as you so aptly explained it, I don’t really want others to know about Esnipe, or they’ll be using Esnipe to bid against me. ;^)
@Leslie R, I think I’m leaning toward just the sort of bifurcated system you describe. It will probably start as cash only then move to a cash/BidPoints approach.
Cheers,
Tom Campbell
From a business point of view, I think you are being too generous with a cash option or double points. I think points equal to what the person signs up for would be more than adequate to get more members. The cash option is money out-of-pocket, while double points probably won’t get you any more sign ups than equal points. Most of these are word-of-mouth and not high volume. Maybe you have a cash payout based on volume – e.g., $20 for 10 new sign-ups plus the bidpoints. Also, I’m curious how you’d handle the verification process so I would be sure I get credit. Great product that I don’t use anywhere near as much as I used to but recommend to my friends whenever the topic comes up!
Thanks, Bob G., I appreciate your thinking. As far as verification, that’s a pretty straightforward database problem with one catch. Despite never (to my wife’s chagrin; she’d like a few more designer purses(I mean bags(and to my chagrin, she buys them retail, not on eBay))) 15% of our email notifications get marked as spam. So notifications would be a problem. We would have to integrate them into the dashboard under a tab, methinks.