Do Merchants Have Too Much Control?

I am probably as big a fan of affiliate you can find anywhere. But no business is perfect and affiliate marketing is no exception. Affiliate marketing is all about affiliates promoting merchants’ products and get paid for their efforts. But that leaves a lot to speculation and a few merchants have taken advantage of this to dictate what affiliates can and can’t display on their sites.

I didn’t want to write this post but I have received too many e-mails from disgruntled affiliates to let this go quietly. A couple of guys who have portals in the financial industry wrote to me that their merchants are asking them to put their products in specific categories. Note that we are not talking about specific copy for affiliate offers. We are talking about a specific portal/blog category. Also, a major credit card company has asked folks to not link directly to their landing pages from blog posts. I understand the business side of this. I know credit card companies make money from transaction fees and all the other fees that they charge folks left and right. But asking your affiliates not to blog about your product is just plain stupid. Besides, for a merchant to ask me how to categorize my content is going overboard.

Unfortunately, merchants have the final say in the affiliate marketing world. It’s true that we affiliates can abandon affiliate programs and go to different markets, but if you have spend 2 years building your affiliate portal, it is a slap in the face to be asked to just have one way of promoting a product. I have been on the other side of the aisle as an affiliate manager, and we never exerted such control over are partners. All we wanted to do was get out of their way and be there for them when they needed our help. But it seems as the economy deteriorates even more, merchants that are feeling the financial crunch are either removing products from their affiliate channel or asking folks to behave a certain way.

There was a time that writing a provocative ad copy for affiliate offers was allowed. Now folks are asking us to show a certain copy and put it under their pre-determined category. That is all fine. But wouldn’t be better if merchant actually took time to create our sites for us, so all we had to do was just drive traffic to it? It seems we are getting there with some merchants, so why not just do that?

Your take: Should merchants have the power to ask you to put their content under a specific blog category? Is it too much to ask for some marketing freedom from merchants? Please share your thoughts.