Hey James,
Happy to help answer any questions you have. Let me first clear up one thing though – because Amazon’s Associate programs are country specific, you aren’t earning international affiliate revenue when just using amazon.com (or .ca or .co.uk, etc) links. You are sending every person to a single storefront regardless of where they’re from, and losing out on affiliate commissions since international traffic typically doesn’t buy from that single storefront. So, I apologize that you may feel that way, but we are not trying to maliciously hijack your international affiliate commissions.
Next, let me try to explain the two uses of our plugin – The Author/Musician/Studio Marketing scenario, and the Affiliate Marketer scenario.
For the authors and musicians and other creative types, we’ve heard that they don’t care about affiliate revenue and just want to make sure people can buy the products they’re creating, no matter where they are in the world. So, if you write a book, you don’t care about the percentage of affiliate revenue you could make, you just want to make sure people can buy your book. Same for musicians, or other people who create products that are sold internationally.
Next, there’s the affiliate marketers, which is the category I’m guessing you fall into. You care deeply about the affiliate revenue potential, and want to make sure every click ends up in a sale. Sending people to the right store and ensuring that your correct international Associates ID is attached is the number one priority.
Based off these two scenarios, we built the plugin in two phases – a completely free plugin that allows you to internationalize your products and get people to the right place to buy, then an option to pair your plugin to a Geniuslink account to maximize your revenue.
So – going back to your question about the use of our own Associate IDs on the plugin. By default, yes – that’s the behavior (which we have tried to convey in the Plugin description). This allows us to offer the plugin for free and helps cover the costs of the servers and manpower to build and maintain the matching algorithms, while also helping us keep the cost down for the Geniuslink account itself if you do decide to actually sign up.
Next, if you DO want to earn Associates Revenue from your international audience, we do ask you create a Geniuslink account for two reasons:
1. Again, since the Associates program is country specific, without creating an account and explicitly telling us what your international Associates IDs are, we have no idea what IDs to use when sending traffic to the international stores for you.
2. We are able to give you a ton more details about your audience through our detailed reports and help you make even more.
Once you’ve signed up for a Geniuslink account and add your own Associates IDs, your IDs are always used from then-on. We stop affiliating them ourselves, and you will make 100% of the revenue for the countries where you have an ID. We just need to know what IDs to use.
I hope that helps explain the reason the plugin is setup the way it is but please let us know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for your time.
