The affiliate fee is a payment for someone who did the work of marketing the product and finding new clients that would otherwise be inaccessible.
You didn’t do any of that. You are just a customer at best and don’t provide any additional value on top of the money you pay for the product. Charging less then is just the company shorting itself for a single customer.
That's one view. But my view is that affiliate links have created a massive race to the bottom, polluting search results and creating a new style of prose optimized for inserting key words and links.
I may not be able to stop that, but I certainly don't want to support it.
Yeah, one of the major issues with running an affiliate program is that there's a real risk that they wind up finding ways to claim your regular customers as theirs. You don't gain anything from such transactions, but they do.
The incentives of affiliates and principals aren't as fully aligned as might be hoped.
It's also effectively defrauding whomever provided the affiliate link. I'm not claiming that it's legal fraud, but it's a mild ethical lapse. They did their job of marketing the product effectively enough that the parent was motivated to buy, and then the parent cheated them out of their reward. It's petty.
The only thing the merchant cares about is CAC. If a customer walks in on their own, and they can acquire their business for less than the affiliate fee, then why not?
If some affiliate is actually doing the work of obtaining the customer to earn the fee, but then the customer has an economic incentive to strip the affiliate attribution to get the fee for themselves, then the affiliate isn’t getting paid. Maybe they’ll recommend another product instead, which doesn’t incentivize users to break the affiliate link.
