Many of the larger retailers are no longer paying affiliate commission via shopping portals. Walmart and Target have been gone from portals for a bit already, and now a reader noticed that eBay is gone as well. Amazon is gone too, even in the select categories which they sometimes used to pay out via portals. Sam’s Club seems to only pay on memberships now.
And some of the larger retailers who are showing portal commissions appear to be very reduced or only available on select portals, e.g. Best Buy.
This is presumably all due to Covid-19 as lots of people are forced to online shopping, and some retailers are even struggling to keep up with demand. They don’t feel the need to pay out commissions anymore. eBay is a bit of a surprise to me.
Amazon affiliates is still working for website/blog affiliations like ours; it’s just not paying out via shopping portals which pay out to the consumer. (Our Amazon link is featured down in the right side-bar on every page on DoC.) eBay is still working for websites/blog affiliates too, last I know.
All the airlines got yanked from Walmart last week
Amazon is back, but only for Amazon Devices, Amazon Home Security/ Smart Home Devices, and Memberships on a few of the CB portals (TCB, BeFrugal, Swagbucks).
Sam’s Club select category cashback is available again through some portals (TCB, SimplyBestCoupons, Swagbucks, Yazing).
Best Buy seems to be back at more portals than before, but still not all (Rakuten, BeFrugal, SimplyBestCoupons, Swagbucks).
eBay… looks like TCB is the only large portal offering cashback again.
Thanks
Does anyone have an idea as to when cashback at Walmart, Target, eBay, etc will come back to the portals?
Maybe benefits on the Synchrony Rakuten credit card will increase
Capturing stimulus dollars and otherwise driving revenue by removing consumer enticements seems, uh… backwards.
I work for a top 10 omnichannel retailer and I can tell you that this phenomenon is not simply attributed to online retailers thriving without the need for affiliate marketing spend. With the exception of Amazon and eBay, each retailer you listed has a brick and mortar presence, and the majority of stores closed represents a huge revenue loss for these retailers. The increase in ecommerce spend is not enough to offset the loss of in-store revenue and overall reduced customer spending due to economic uncertainty.
While the likes of Amazon and eBay do not have the albatross of stores, their problem is that customer spending is heavily focused on “essentials” right now which also happen to have some of the lowest profit margins for retailers. And something affecting all companies is the cost of labor which is skyrocketing due to measures and preparations companies have to put in place to ensure health and safety of their workforce. In fact, in an earnings call from Amazon last week, the company reported a profit loss despite the surge in sales on their site due to the above factors.
So TLDR conclusion is that the reduction of affiliate marketing spend is not a result of positive online sales, it’s actually companies looking to cut back on their marketing expenses to reflect today’s environment and anticipated deterioration of it as COVID-19 continues to unfold.
Interesting, thanks for chiming in
FWIW: Your assertion that Amazon lost money is inaccurate.
Amazon reported first quarter earnings of $5.01 per share on revenue of $75.5 billion.
On their earnings call, Mr. Bezos said “Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on COVID-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe.”
The weird thing is when they’re still available but only in a very few portals. Like Bed Bath Beyond is gone from almost everywhere except Jetblue, but they’re still honoring purchases.
Walmart’s terms on ineligible items changed late in 2019 to be a list of like 100 words long. For me the big retailers were a great way to build airline miles (reimbursed office supply expenses in the thousands$). Too bad not in the near future.
Some stores have returned. Sally Beauty is an example. I would expect some of them to return once this calms down a bit.
In my view, shopping portal does not benefit the merchants. Most of the time I find the deal on one website but end up buying through a portal paying me the highest cash back. Not complaining but feels unfair for the website really drives the traffic.
Yeah, it’s hard for me to see how most companies would make money from cashback sites. I can kind of see the benefit of paying a commission to a website that actually drives a sale — like say slickdeals promotes an item on sale and you click their link — but generic commissions seem foolish. We’ve been seeing this trend for more than a year now, and I assume it will continue.
A few ways a portal might help a merchant:
Store A and Store B have the item I want for the same price. Store A gives higher portal cashback than Store B, so I’ll shop at Store A.
Or maybe I’ve never heard of Store B before but I see them advertised on a portal, so I look at Store B and buy something there. Or I knew about the store and was thinking about buying an item but didn’t like the price; I see them advertised with high portal cashback and that pushes me to make the purchase.