“Worst” practice: discouraging international affiliates

As an affiliate located in Hungary, i am reminded every single day that i am a marginal user when it comes to e-commerce or any other internet activity that involves money. Many of the top online stores refuse to ship to Europe, many eBay sellers are too lazy to check the intl postage fees and ship outside the US (it’s not rocket science folks!), and of course, affiliate managers are too lazy to care about us international affiliates no matter what kind of business we do.

I have a few websites that contain a fair amount of affiliate links (with some of them 100% affiliate sites). All of these websites are in English and target predominantly North American Internet users. Yet, just because my registration info contains my Hungarian address, about 40% of affiliate programs reject my application automatically. There is the ocassional program that accepts me after i email them and explain the situation, but there are many, surprisingly many who never take a second to check my site and see if i am a potential money maker for them.

Today i was confronted with an escalated version of this negligence. I was planning to build a niche affiliate site and would have joined a couple of European affiliate programs at UK and Germany based affiliate networks. I emailed the networks to see if they would mind if i promoted their merchants on a non-English and non-German language site. Their reply was an outright NO in all but one cases.

I think this is very unreasonable considering that:
The merchants DO ship to my country, so the traffic generated would be legitimate.
The ads would be placed on a site that is registered with the affiliate network, so it can be checked before approval and re-checked if there is any doubt on a sale.
Because this is performance-based marketing, why would I spend the time to build a site and build the affiliate links and manage them if i didn’t believe that they would produce sales or leads (which equals $$$ for the merchant AND the network…)?

I’m not saying that they shouldn’t care where affiliates put their links, i’m suggesting that they would be much better off if they approved international affiliate applications on a case-by-case basis. You CAN tell a site’s quality even if it’s in a foreign language. Plus you can always make your affiliate explain their site and business model to prove that they should be accepted. I wouldn’t have a problem with having to prove i’m legitimate, but the networks and merchants are simply not giving me a chance to do that. Time to change!

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