Problem

While a large brand may have a global presence their online store is most likely broken into many country specific storefronts. (For example, iTunes supported countries). Reasons for this can include intricate distribution rights, language localization, import and export laws, and tax issues to name a few.

In an effort to better promote the global brand and the country specific storefronts, individual affiliate programs are launched that are also storefront specific.

Individual affiliate programs typically require multiple affiliate networks to offer a brand’s affiliate programs in the local markets. This geographic segmentation is a problem for the publishers and developers of popular websites, blogs and apps.

Affiliate networks also tend to be focused on a specific country or region. Affiliate networks typically require a physical presence in the country they operate in order to house the account mangers and legal, accounting and sales teams necessary to keep the company operational.

However, publishers and developers of popular websites and apps look to build the largest possible audiences for their products as quickly and easily as possible. Many prefer to open up worldwide distribution rather than focus on a specific region, resulting in app downloads and website traffic arriving from every corner of the world.

Geographic segmentation affects affiliate publishers in the following ways:

Poor User Experience

The many storefronts of a brand are unique entities with a similar, but not exact, catalog of products. As a result, links to a specific item in one storefront will typically not work for other storefronts.

International users, after clicking on these links, will either be brought to a storefront from which it's not practical to purchase from or will be routed to their local storefront but encounter an error stating that the item they were looking for cannot be found. Both of these scenarios result in a poor user experience and can damage the reputation of both the website or app sending the user and that of the brand.

Lost Commissions

Using a single, country specific affiliate program will prevent you from earning commissions on sales from all your international traffic.

Creating multiple, storefront specific links for an item can be time consuming and won't guarantee that the user will choose the correct one. Displaying multiple storefront specific links takes up valuable space on your webpage and is not aesthetically pleasing.

See how these problems affect the iTunes Affiliate Program
See how these problems affect the Amazon Associates Program