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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good way to contact an online business directly and say "It seems you pay a 20% affiliate fee. I would like a 20% discount?" Amazon kinda does this with smile and donations, even though I don't use amazon anymore.

I go out of my way, with link strippers, cookie removers, adblockers, to the point of often manually copy and pasting links into a private window if necessary, to avoid affiliate links. When I do this I usually feel like I'm supporting the online store, but there are some cases (e.g. I'm looking for an oversized mattress) where I know the whole industry is corrupt and I just want to pay as little rent as possible.

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The affiliate fee is a payment for someone who did the work of marketing the product and finding new clients that would otherwise be inaccessible.

You didn’t do any of that. You are just a customer at best and don’t provide any additional value on top of the money you pay for the product. Charging less then is just the company shorting itself for a single customer.

It's also effectively defrauding whomever provided the affiliate link. I'm not claiming that it's legal fraud, but it's a mild ethical lapse. They did their job of marketing the product effectively enough that the parent was motivated to buy, and then the parent cheated them out of their reward. It's petty.

The only thing the merchant cares about is CAC. If a customer walks in on their own, and they can acquire their business for less than the affiliate fee, then why not?

If some affiliate is actually doing the work of obtaining the customer to earn the fee, but then the customer has an economic incentive to strip the affiliate attribution to get the fee for themselves, then the affiliate isn’t getting paid. Maybe they’ll recommend another product instead, which doesn’t incentivize users to break the affiliate link.

That's one view. But my view is that affiliate links have created a massive race to the bottom, polluting search results and creating a new style of prose optimized for inserting key words and links.

I may not be able to stop that, but I certainly don't want to support it.

Yeah, one of the major issues with running an affiliate program is that there's a real risk that they wind up finding ways to claim your regular customers as theirs. You don't gain anything from such transactions, but they do.

The incentives of affiliates and principals aren't as fully aligned as might be hoped.

20% is rarely 20%. Most affilates have to reach a minimum and 90% never do. The small % who do are worth the 20%.

You trying to cut them out. I don't think it's in the sites best interest to offer people like you (cookie killers),a discount. If the affilates find out and they feel cheated they will move on.

Remember the affilate never gives one person at 20% (if they do they never hit their minimum) they give dozen/hundreds/thousands of customers.

That’s often what’s said, but the reality is different. It’s vastly easier for someone to get in between a future customer and a sale than it is to generate a new customer. Which is why affiliate programs are so frequently canceled without ill effect.

EX: Grubhub chnaginging Yelp phone numbers to get an affiliate commission on people looking up a restaurants phone number.

If you're in the UK, then you can use Topcashback [1] or Quidco [2]. Both of these links are affiliate links too, so if you start receiving cashback then I'll get £20.

With both of these services, you get to collect the affiliate fee. Some things like insurance are huge and you can easily get £100 for them, most are much smaller.

1. https://www.topcashback.co.uk/ref/aembleton

2. https://www.quidco.com/raf/23003/

Hmmm, these meta affiliate links have confused my moral compass ;)

Lucky I'm not in the UK :)

Honey and Rakuten’s eBates have similar programs.

Sure. Email them and ask.

Keep in mind though that affiliate programs are not necessarily sleazy. By default nobody knows about your product. Some of our partners have been making tutorials in other languages and building API integrations into their products. They deserve the money we send them.

They may not be "sleazy" but they incentivize reviews/referrals/recommendations based on what the affiliate gets rather based on what product is the best. This pollutes the entired internet, making it significantly harder to find what you want as a consumer. On the whole, affiliate programs are a net negative for society and anyone taking part in them show reconsider their ethics.

You can say the exact same thing about all forms of marketing. By your logic, companies should never be allowed to advertise. Incumbents would love that.

Affiliate systems are the marketing equivalent of gig work. The quality of both product and affiliate are quite variable, but a good product and good affiliate are a strong net positive for society. Again, to use my case as an example, we have API integrations that we wouldn't have otherwise had and video tutorials in languages that we don't speak. Our customers love our product, I'm not ashamed to reward them for talking about it.

If you think every product should sell itself by 100% organic word of mouth... well, that's the rare exception, not the rule. If you're trying to build a business this way, you're in for a rough time.

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