Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Tracfone Affiliate Change of Terms

If you are a Tracfone Affiliate, then you might already be aware of the recent terms change in CJ. If you are not, basically it says that Tracfone will no longer pay commission on airtime but will pay 18% on phones. I guess this is good but mostly bad and I can't say it surprises me one bit. One of my pages was doing very well (at least by my standards which are not that high) because providing links to buy airtime is easy. After all every Tracfone Customer needs airtime right? I figured Tracfone probably knew this all along and realized they really don't need affiliates to sell airtime. Anyhow, so how does the new terms affect commissions. Well, it puts a rather large hit on them. I figure at least a 40-50 percent hit. Another bad thing about the terms is that instead of paying a straight $5 on ALL phone sales, they are now paying 18%. You might think, Wow 18%, thats pretty good! Well, not really, you see, the best selling phones are those under 20 bucks so with this Terms change, commissions on those are all under the previous $5.00. So all in all, the end result of the terms change is that a lot of affiliates will make a lot less money. With the new Terms change, Tracfone benefits in 3 ways. They obviously pay out less money, they get people to sell more phones and they get lots of free traffic from the sites offering airtime card coupons. I doubt that coupon site operators will change their strategy because the coupons generate traffic and sometimes result in phone sales.

If you denied the terms, then you were not affected or have not been affected YET. The current terms expire on 2/13/09 so enjoy it while it lasts.

Are you a Tracfone affiliate? If so, how much of a hit are your commissions taking? Feel free to comment, im really curious how others feel about this.

No comments: