Frequently
Asked Questions
General
Payments
Tracking Leads & Sales
Adding Links
Legal Info
The Affiliate Program allows you to place
links to our services on your web site, newsletter or emails. By placing
these links, viewers have the opportunity to buy products and
services. If a sign-up is purchased through your link, we pay you a
commission for each sale. This
means that when the client renews or purchases another product you still
earn your commission. We provide the tools to enable you to maximise
revenue potential.
First, you must read and accept our
Affiliate Terms. Then, you complete our online
Application Form. After your application is submitted, you will
instantly be emailed the details you need to login to the affiliate
centre. From here you can choose from a wide selection of buttons and
banners so you can get started immediately.
Becoming an affiliate is FREE. We don't
charge you to become an affiliate, and the only effort required on your
part is promotion of the service. We make this as easy as possible by
providing you with a variety of buttons, banners, text links and editorial
for you to utilise.
Anyone can join from anywhere. Currently
payments are only made in UK sterling by cheque, however we are looking at
ways to ease the process for foreign websites and are actively looking
into alternative payment methods.
This is a new program, so initially we
would like to work directly with our partners and not through a third
party. We have the technology available to us to make this possible, so
until we have fully explored the medium it makes sense to keep it
"in-house".
We have also been particularly creative
with the way in which you can link to us, from standard banners, to
interstitials, text links and complete web sites branded in your own name.
We haven't seen this number of options offered elsewhere and are unsure
whether external systems will support such a diversity.
The other major reason is cost, all of
the networks would like to charge some kind of start-up fee and an
additional "over-ride" on all sales, effectively this is commission being
taken from your pocket and into theirs.
We are however actively considering other
systems and are negotiating with both the UK and International Affiliates
Networks to try and get the best deal for all of us. Inevitably however
those that sign-up through one of the networks are likely to be paid
slightly less than those that signed up at the beginning directly with us.
Our interest in joining a network is the captive audience of resellers
that it offers. The benefits are to us and not you however, we believe we
have a robust system in place and you can always use it in conjunction
with a third party tracking system if you want verification of our
honesty.
Yes, we provide a massive variety of ways
to link to us, you can include a text link in your emails, or add a
signature to your forum posts. These are just two examples of ways to
promote our services without a website.
If you have an offline member base you
want to promote the services to you can also download one of our complete
co-branded websites and host it anywhere you like (we can even provide you
the space) and direct traffic to it. If your organisation has more than
300 members we can even custom design a website to fit your needs,
completely free, just contact us by email:
affiliates@pobox.co.uk
A white label site effectively enables
you to be a vISP (virtual Internet Service Provider), you can host all the
product and service detail pages on your own website, in your own look and
feel. The white label site is exactly that, vanilla templates with
content, awaiting your design. Co-Branded websites are pre-designed and
ready to upload, simply add your affiliate ID, and Logo's to the pages and
your in business.
We take care of everything but marketing
your website. The pages have been optimised for search engine
effectiveness, are professionally designed and enable you to sell our
products and services directly from your website, under your name and
brand; as an "Approved POBOX Affiliate Partner".
Earnings are automatically sent out every
month via cheque to all Affiliates who have accumulated at least £35 in
their account for a period of at least 2 months (as little as 6 sales can
earn £38). We will issue a direct payment to your bank account via BACS for the sales you referred to our
site every 25th of the month for sales generated from 2 month previous.
This is to limit fraudulent transactions, essentially sales made in
January result in a payment in March.
In most instances you earn 15% of
revenue, that is what the client is charged before tax. In some instances,
where there are much smaller profit margins we provide you 15% of the
profit accrued, before internal costs (marketing, service, support). We are NOT
trying to be evasive you can see exactly what we pay out by
visiting our
Commissions Page
Earnings are automatically sent out every
month via cheque to all Affiliates who have accumulated at least £35 in
their account for a period of at least 2 months (as little as 2 sales can
earn £38). We will send you a cheque for the sales you referred to our
site every 25th of the month for sales generated from 2 month previous.
This is to limit fraudulent transactions, essentially sales made in
January result in a cheque in March.
You earn commission repeatedly from
clients referred to POBOX. When a customer renews their account you earn
up to 15%, if they upgrade their account you earn up to 15%, if they make
subsequent purchases you earn up to 15%. Lifetime is the length of time
the individual remains a client. The current average lifetime of a
customer is 3.5 years. If you were to sign-up 10 accounts a month, you
would receive affiliate commissions for 120 customers every month by the
end of your first year.
Once a customer makes a purchase via your
link, your affiliate ID is "hardcoded" into their account, ensuring you
never miss a commission payment, regardless of their payment method.
Yes we will pay you on every sale
generated from your website, our payment threshold is not designed to
"scam" or "rip off" smaller merchants. Our payment threshold is £35,
easily achievable with our high payouts. We set a payment threshold to
enable us to keep our costs down and to ensure we can pay the best
possible commissions. However you are entitled to your monies regardless
of how much you sell. So if at anytime you wish to cancel your Affiliate
Partnership, you can do so and will receive payment of any commissions
within 60 days (we reserve the right to charge a £3.50 processing fee to
cover our costs in this instance).
There are too many ways to generate false
visitors and blur traffic results, whilst we thought long and hard about
various ways to police the system it all amounted to management costs.
Whilst we may be happy to pay a nominal fee for qualified traffic it seems
there are too many opportunities for us to be ripped off. It therefore
makes sense to us to pay the highest possible commission payments, and
therefore reward our partners for the very best possible leads, those that
result in a sale.
Yes, resellers, web designers and IT
consultants are all especially encouraged to join. You can earn revenue
from your own purchases both initial and subsequent. Just ensure you
follow one of your links to sign-up.
Our basic account is priced (£5) such
that people can easily afford to "lose the money" if they are not
satisfied. It is also priced in such a way as for it not to make us any
profit if they do leave in their first month. It is therefore in our
interest to keep them happy so they do not cancel. In any case you are
paid your commission regardless of whether the customer chooses to stay or
not. In the case of credit card fraud or other chargeback by the bank in
relation to the sale we will be forced however to cancel any commission
payable.
We have a web based administration area,
from here you can see your stats in real time. Every click, where it was
generated and every sale is available to you.
You are considered our partner and
therefore we have done everything possible to ensure you get credit for
every lead and paid for every sale you make. Once you pass a visitor to
our website a cookie is placed on their machine enabling us to tie up any
subsequent purchases to your affiliate account. Once a purchase is made
your affiliate code is permanently associated with their account, ensuring
you receive credit for all future purchases.
In the interests of transparency we have
utilized a system that you can take a close look at, "PHP Affiliate" from
http://www.organicphp.com. The
system is released in the GNU format meaning we could rewrite the code
from the ground up, maximizing security, and adding features to make
things easier for you. The modified version can run on any system with PHP
and mySQL installed (can we recommend ourselves) and is available to
download in the members area. We have nothing to hide, and have tried to
ensure the system is as infallible as it can be. We have thoroughly tested
to ensure it is fully working and non-Beta.
Cookies last 14 days, this means if you
someone visits us from one of your links, they do not have to make a
purchase straight away, in fact even if they leave it two weeks you will
still get paid your commission. You are offered more protection than
simply a cookie however, once a customer makes a purchase they are your
forever, hardcoded into their account is your affiliate id ensuring you
always earn from subsequent purchases.
Yes, once a customer makes a purchase via
one of your links you will always get recurring revenue by way of
commissions. We pay the same commission on subsequent purchases and
renewals as we would if it was the first purchase. This is rare in
affiliate schemes and goes some way to illustrate our commitment to our
partners. In addition we do NOT utilise a cookie for tracking future
purchases. Your affiliate code is "hardcoded" i.e. permanently associated
in our database with that clients records. As long as they are a client,
you earn commission.
You can check visitor traffic and number
of sales from your affiliate admin area. Details for logging in are
emailed to you immediately on joining. The statistics are updated live,
both clicks and sales are updated instantly. You can see from exactly what
page on which site you referred someone to our website as well as the time
of the visit. This information helps you to work out which links are
working the best for you.
It is in our interests to ensure you are
happy, this means not cheating and ensuring the best possible conversions
from visitors to sales. Our relationship is a partnership and one that we
value, you are after all an extension to our sales channel. That said if
you do not feel comfortable with the statistics by all means use a 3rd
party system to check the accuracy of the information we provide. You
could use your own web-logs or external service providers to check-up on
us. Our links are designed in such a way as to work with any system that
accepts a php based query (e.g. www.name.com/ref.php?sale=123).
Yes. You only need one account and you
can use it with as many websites as you like. The code we provide can be
used in a banner rotation across a network of sites if you wished. The
online Affiliate Admin Centre ensures you can see from which site (and
exactly which page) your visitors have come from. This makes things easier
for everyone all round, after all you are 1 person, so why would you want
more than one cheque. All sales from all sites are accumulated into one
account.
As soon as you sign-up you will receive
an email with the details of the affiliate admin centre. From there you
can choose from a wide variety of linking options that best suit the style
of your website or newsletter.
We try to design and offer as a wide a
range of creative as possible, if however you don't see something that
meets your needs, or have idea's for alternatives, by all means contact us
with details. If we create custom creative for you it is likely to be
offered out to other affiliates on the network. You are free however to
design your own custom creative, if it is to include our Name or Logo
please email us a copy for approval prior to use.
The latest copy of our terms and
conditions are always available at the following url:
http://www.pobox.co.uk/affiliates/terms.htm
Please ensure you have read and
understood them prior to joining.
Any legal website is free to join our
network of partners, we do not however condone spam, and any partner found
to be utilising UCE resulting in complaints is likely to have his account
terminated. To be on the safe side if you have any queries in this regard
please email us.
Of course there is....Who do you think
writes this? Human support personnel are available to speak to all callers
between 9am and 9pm. To us, your business is extremely important, and we
would welcome your enquiry, in the first instance by email, (
affiliates@pobox.co.uk ) or on 08705 168 160 if you would rather deal
with one of us humans ;)
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