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| Walmart has an affiliate program but does it pay as well as the Amazon affiliate program? |
To be fair to Amazon, word on the street is that they had to discourage online sales because their warehouses couldn't handle the demand. Millions of people were suddenly shopping online because they had to stay home to fight the Covid-19 virus.
Although many people saw Amazon's decision as cruel and heartless, I know some marketers who saw the commission policy change as an opportunity to test some other affiliate programs. In the United States Amazon's biggest online competitors are supposedly Target and Walmart.
As an American consumer I have shopped online for all three sites. It never occurred to me that you could make money online as a Target or Walmart affiliate. But when I tried to apply to their affiliate programs my applications were rejected.
After yelling "WTF" a few times I contacted a friend of mine who makes money from affiliate marketing. He hadn't made any money with either Target or Walmart so he suggested I look for reviews of their affiliate programs. His reasoning is that if anyone makes money from these programs, they'll say so somewhere.
Off I went to Google to search for Walmart affiliates who make money.
I didn't find anyone. I found a lot of blogs explaining how you can make money from the Walmart affiliate program but no one claimed to have made any money. So these were just bloggers creating content for their blogs.
I wasn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. I knew I had to have at least 1 friend who was in the Walmart program. So I asked everyone in my tier 1 address book to tell me what they thought of the program.
All I heard was thundering silence for a couple of months. Finally got this email from a friend who has a lot of experience in SEO and affiliate marketing.
Hi J.
Missed your email a few weeks ago. Sorry. Yes, R. and I are in the Walmart affiliate program. We got in through Impact.
Although we have generated a lot of clicks for the program so far we haven't been credited with any sales.
Can't say I recommend it but this program may work for someone who really wants to push Walmart products. Maybe the secret is in their 3rd-party marketplace. It works a lot like Amazon's.
M.
And I wanted to stop right there but I thought, okay, one bad experience doesn't describe the whole world. I went back to Google and searched for more people who talked about Walmart's affiliate program.
I finally found one person at Warrior Forum who said they gave up because as soon as any products they recommended became available in the stores their sales dropped off.
This isn't necessarily the final word on Walmart's affiliate program but my gut says if people were really making money from this program someone would be talking about it. You can find blogs where people share their monthly commission revenue. I've never found one where people talk about earning money from Walmart or Target.
I search for monthly revenue reports from bloggers who share their affiliate marketing goals. The majority of them make money from Amazon and AdSense. A lot of them make money from ShareASales too.
There's no one out there talking about how much money they make from the Walmart affiliate program.
I don't know why Walmart has an affiliate program. They don't seem very interested in rewarding people for helping them online.
If I had to guess why the program pays so little it is because the cookies only last 72 hours. People probably spend more time browsing the Walmart site than shopping. They have to think about what they are doing. They're more likely to get what they want from a local Walmart store than to have it delivered.
Maybe what affiliate marketers need to do for Walmart is push its in-store pickup, curbside pickup, and home delivery options more. It might take a while for a blog's readers to accept that Walmart sells the same kind of merchandise as Amazon and has several alternatives to driving to the store and walking inside.
Walmart has so many loyal customers they may not care about helping affiliate marketers. Or maybe they just want to use affiliate marketers to build their brand value without paying any decent compensation.
My friend says he'll leave the Walmart links in place to collect data but they are not going out of their ways to promote Walmart's products. They need proof that it would be worth the effort. They make most of their money from AdSense and Amazon like everyone else.
