Affiliate Marketing for B2B third party trading website

We are planning to aunch our affiliate program on Commission Junction (CJ) soon. According to our previous experience in Google Affiliate Network and Shareasale, I would like to talk about a few factors that need to be carefully considered for a B2B third-party trading website when launching affiliate program.

The fisrt factor that may limit the performance of our affiliate program is that not many publishers target the B2B wholesale area in the affiliate atmosphere. It is true that about 80% websites that we in-coporated with were B2C-based, most buyer's purchasing capability driven from these publishers are limited and not interested in bulk purchase. Further implications of this fact is that these publishers tend to understand how to attract individual consumers but got very narrow marketing mediums or ideas about bringing in business purchasers, which requires some input from our side. We may, however, even suggest that a certain web page or advertising space to be customized designed in order to adapt to our B2B kind banner ad.

The second element is the commission structure. Our website acts like a third party and only collect commission from buyers after their products have been sold. The nature of this type of business model brings the fact that percentage-based commission will not be favouable. Think about it, we get only about 12% commission from the total amount generated from a buyer's order, the 12% is the total money we earned and then how much we can distribute to our publishers will bring strong impact on our profit margin.

For now we will stick with pay-per-lead for out affiliate program, which means that commission will be made based on each sign up.