Pending Sale Functionality

Join Now

LinkConnector's Pending Sale functionality allows merchants to designate a sale (or lead) as pending until post-sale requirements are met and they are able to recognize the event as final. Reasons for holding an event as pending include processing a credit card offline, order verification, paying for a service without a credit card (e.g., direct debit, from a tax refund, etc.), as well as other post-sale requirements. Once post-sale requirements have been met, merchants validate the sale to properly compensate affiliates.

How It Works

When merchants create a sale or lead event to use in their affiliate marketing campaigns, they assign certain properties to that event. For example, they decide whether or not to pay a fixed amount for a sale each time or whether to pay a percentage of the sale amount. Another event property relates to event handling. By default, a sale or lead event can be set as pending or valid. If initially set to pending, merchants can then mark the event as valid or invalid before the end of the month closeout. Another property that relates to this functionality is the reporting of pending events. Merchants may choose to show affiliates the pending sales or leads in reporting so affiliates can view the potential of their traffic before that potential is realized. This usually occurs when there is a long turnaround on the sale or when a large percentage of the sales or leads are expected to become valid within the month.

Pay Per Sale for More Merchants

For merchants that do not finalize their sales in an online shopping cart, Pay Per Sale affiliate campaigns have in the past presented an unrealistic option for them to promote their business and increase sales. While these merchants have historically relied on the riskier Pay Per Click and Pay Per Lead promotions, the increasing use of click rings, automated click bots, and other forms of affiliate fraud have led many of these merchants to abandon Affiliate Marketing entirely. LinkConnector's Pending Sale functionality allows these merchants to return with a more reliable and less fraud prone, Pay Per Sale promotion. While LinkConnector is doing all it can to lower the risk of Pay Per Click and Pay Per Lead campaigns by eliminating fraud, many merchants have been burned in the past with these types of campaigns and are only willing to participate in a Pay Per Sale campaign which normally wouldn't fit with their type of business model. Pending Sale functionality allows them to try Affiliate Marketing again with much less risk.

Affiliate Benefits

First and foremost, with much of the risk associated with increasing online sales eliminated, merchants can afford to pay affiliates more for effective traffic. Additionally, affiliates benefit from this new functionality by having more merchants return to Affiliate Marketing. These additional merchants will compete for an affiliate's traffic thereby driving rewards up.