Forums: Projects Theory and Miscellanea:

Anyone has expierience with referral programs?

For one of our products i want to offer a referral program so when they place a link/banner/button on their site and someone buys a product they get a 25% commision of the sale.

But i'm not sure if this is a good way to sell stuff, does it really work?
We allready have alot of resellers (agencies) but i want to offer also something for others to earn money and at the same time promote the product and name.

I have worked with an online casino- the bulk of their income comes from gamblers refered to the casino (the referrers get a good cut, which changes according to the number of users they send - eg, 20 a month will get them 15%; 30 will get 20% etc)

It is a real pain in the arse keeping the referrers happy- you must have super-accurate stats and payouts as they will be monitoring closely (perhaps, not so much as in the online gaming industry) and will be able to see how many click-throughs leave their site for yours.

Make sure you only credit referrers when there is an actual sale, it is all too easy to fake the referral.

That being said, the reason online gaming houses use referrers is that the users that they pass through have a higher number of "sales" than the average stumbler: they target the market aggressively, and are often very very serious about SEO for their niche.