What Is an Affiliate?

So you’re shopping on a website and you see a promotion from another company. It turns out the website your shopping on has entered into an Affiliate agreement with a branded company. What is an Affiliate? Why would a company want to be an Affiliate? Can I buy from both and pay all at one time?

Let’s take the questions one at a time:

What is an Affiliate? – An Affiliate is a company that markets another company’s brand, usually in addition to its own products.

Why would a company want to be an Affiliate? -- At CollectionsGiftsandMore.com, the goal is to be a full service gift website. Gift giving covers an enormously large spectrum of products and services. On any given day up to 2400 different items can be shipped but that doesn’t come close to the demand or variety required to be a full service gift website. People want gifts for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, friendship and all other occasions. So the company partnered with 30 plus companies to broaden the assortment of gifts to include flowers, gift baskets, fruit baskets, greeting cards, novelty candy, chocolates, stationary and tickets to plays, concerts and sporting events, just to name a few. The brand companies are normally established businesses with their own stores and websites who are looking for more avenues to sell their products or services.

Can I buy from both and pay all at one time? – No. When you buy from the branded company you will go to their website and will checkout using their shopping cart. You will also be bound by their policies. In exchange the branded company pays a portion of any sale linked to the Affiliate site directly to the Affiliate.

When a customer goes from an Affiliate site to the branded site a cookie is placed on their browser to identify which Affiliate site they came from. That cookie remains for about 30 days, sometimes longer. The important part here for the Affiliate is that there is no payment if the customer goes directly to the brand site beyond that specified time period. Some companies will offer promotions that are only available through the Affiliates website. This creates more incentive to utilize the Affiliate website.

Affiliate agreements are a win – win for all involved. The branded company gets free advertising exposure. The Affiliate gets to expand their offerings without investing in inventory while associating with a name brand company. The customer gets a bigger selection with less searching. It’s similar to going to the mall instead of several individual stores.