Interview with Commission Junction

The site, commission-junction.com, is the subject of these questions:

1. How did you first get into this? What inspired you to create your affiliate program?

Name: Lex Sisney
Age: 28
Education: Marketing Management degree from The University of St. Thomas. Minor in Mandarin Chinese.

Work Experience: My background is in designing EDI and Internet Commerce solutions. As the Business Development Manager for Control Data Systems, I spent over three years living and working throughout Asia, including China, Singapore, and Korea. In this role, I designed EDI and Internet Commerce services for Sprint, Sing Tel, Dacom, and Rayes (privately financed China-wide network).

I left Asia in 1996 and returned to my home in Minneapolis to create a new Internet start-up called ProcureLink. ProcureLink was designed to use corporate intranets for contract buying of operating resources (things like office supplies, maintenance and repair, computer hardware, software, etc) . After nine months of serious effort, blood, sweat, and tears, I lost out to better financed competition (see Ariba, IBM, and Trilogy). Despite my loss, I learned a great deal about what it takes to launch a new business from this experience.

Soon after, while a consultant for a small Internet Commerce company called Net-Medical, I launched my first affiliate program. I found this experience to be both rewarding and very frustrating. From a merchant's perspective, our program succeeded in signing-up many new associates. However, there were also significant costs associated with:

• verifying and approving associates;

• tracking and reporting sales and commission statistics;

• fraud management;

• associate support and training;

• establishing and maintaining 'trust' with associates;

• issuing payment.

I also engaged in many other merchant's revenue sharing programs as an affiliate. Dealing with payment threshold's of $50 or $100, monitoring different tracking systems, managing different user id's and password's, and losing out on some poorly run and disreputable programs - all made me feel that there was a better way to run an affiliate network. Commission Junction was designed to solve the inherent problems (for both merchants and affiliates) of a revenue sharing programs, while leveraging its unique advantages.

2. Could you explain the strategy behind your associate program?

In a sentence: Make it easy for affiliates to join, monitor, and earn revenue from our merchant partner programs.

With competing solutions, when affiliates join more than one merchant program, they deal with each merchant separately. Consequently, they must wait until their commission levels reach $50 or $100 before they get paid and they have a management nightmare in monitoring their multiple accounts.

With Commission Junction, we handle everything for the affiliates. Monthly payments are consolidated into a single check, representing total sales from multiple merchants. Affiliates also manage all of their sales and earnings reports with a single ID and password. These features can't be overemphasized. We make it easy for affiliates to join our merchant partner programs; affiliates continue to actively promote these programs because they get a pay-check each month while receiving the convenience and accuracy of a trusted-third-party service.

Merchants enjoy the benefits of reduced administrative costs and increased exposure of their program. Each of our merchant partners has their own "branded" sign-up form. Whatever affiliates they recruit from their site - they keep on their site. We also recruit and sign-up affiliates from the Commission Junction web site and directory.

3. Tell us a little about the results you've achieved in terms of your business. Also, if you have specific associates who have been successful, can you share that also?

We are a new company and are busily working to integrate leading merchant programs into our service. We have a back-log of 15 great programs. Stay tuned for our success stories.

4. What are you most proud of and why?

I have a wealth of determination and a clear vision of how I want to lead my life.

5. What do you think are the key elements that make your program successful?

See above. (Real-time reporting, monthly checks, dual exposure, branded sign-up, easy-to-use site, upfront approach).

6. Can you give us a specific example of one of these elements in action?

Before we created Commission Junction, we took an objective look at associate programs and existing service providers like LinkShare and BeFree. We believe that we created a better mouse trap by integrating all of these features into our service and more.

7. How do you let people know what you will and won't allow in your program? How do you keep tabs on this, or do you?

The service agreement clearly states who and who can't join. I.e. No adult or illegal activity. We monitor all new sign-ups to ensure that they meet this criteria. Our merchant partners can elect to automatically approve or manually approve their associate applications.

8. Anything we haven't covered that you'd like to share?

Commission Junction set-up fees are $245 for a "do-it-yourself" set-up or $545 for assisted set-up. We earn 15% of the commission payout for our services. E.g. if a merchant pays $1 per lead, we earn 15%.

9. How can our readers contact you for more information?

Commission Junction
800/761-1072
info@commission-junction.com
http://www.commission-junction.com