The Independent section is available to contributors only as an incentive to add more network codes and offers.
On the homepage of your login area you will see how many independent codes/offers you are allowed to add via your account. *Codes / offers for independent merchants go in all feeds containing the full affiliate link of the contributor.
(iCodes feeds are requested 18 million times per month by around 900 UK affiliates)
The amount of codes / offers you are allowed to enter into the independent section depends on the amount of live codes / offers you have added to the network sections.
*If any user doesn't want to include independent merchants in their feeds either select them as 'rejected' or use the parameter &Relationship=joined in your webservices requests. (selecting them as joined will still include them but still use the contributors ids) *See exclusions at base of page.
This is a trial beta version to see if it increases contributions so we would be grateful if you allowed these independent merchants in your feeds because it has the potential to benefit everybody.. more network deals for you (containing your id's) and a great incentive for contributors.
The following websites are NOT allowed to be listed..
- Merchants which can also be found in the networks we cater for. - Websites of an adult nature. - Affiliate sites.
The following websites ARE allowed to be listed..
- Merchants without affiliate programs. - Merchants with independent programs. - Merchants on network we do not cater for.
Exclusions - Although Amazon is listed in the independent section Amazon's codes and offers are syndicated in the normal way and contain the id's of the user importing the data (if you have selected the merchant as joined and entered your Amazon ID in 'my affiliate ids')
The reason for the Independent Section
iCodes depends on the users who contribute to adding codes and offers, without these contributors iCodes would not exist or would be out of the price range of most affiliates.
Currently only 2% of users contribute to populating the database yet they pay the same as those who do not contribute anything or very little, (simply giving them the service for free is not much of an incentive because it is already so cheap, plus we do not want to give free users access to edit the database)
Generally contibutors are the small affiliates with low traffic websites, due to this they are the ones who actually benefit the least from the work they put in.
The reason for this incentive is to increase the chance that the contributors will actually make extra commission by getting their affiliate links distributed amonst a wider range of websites, at the same time giving everybody more network offers to make commission and a wider range of merchants to offer your visitors.
