By Simon Jones

Most online sellers work with affiliates, who market products and services in a variety of ways and earn their income through revenue shares. Affiliates themselves may use any number of different ways to attract new prospects and customers – ranging from Pay-per-Click Google campaigns through email newsletters, blog networks and many others.

What affiliates and the merchants with whom they partner have in common, without fail is this: they’re all in it to make money.

By Simon Jones

In the retail world there is an unspoken convention that when checking out you must be bombarded by inexpensive impulse purchase-driven items. At the grocery store, you are tempted by bubble gum, magazines and phone cards. At furniture stores like Ikea, even, you may be tempted by Swedish meatballs and chocolate bars. And who ever left a fast food restaurant without being asked “do you want fries with that?”

There have been recent comments around the internet regarding Plimus’ decision to delay payment to some vendors. Financial matters can be a sensitive issue and, understandably, the idea of receiving a partial payment will upset some. However, our decision to deliver only partial revenue for a standard scheduled payout is rooted in the interest of security and we have specific protocols in place to protect the interests of all related parties: vendors, customers, affiliates as well as ourselves as a company.

We are very happy to announce the release of our new Conduit Affiliate toolbar!

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The webinar session we ran last week with Alan Kay on Getting Sky-High Conversion is now available online.

Our Conversion webinar with Alan Kay is now online and can be freely accessed from here.

It was a mammoth session of over an hour involving presentations on both Buy Now and Landing Pages. We advise you to at least view the first half of the webinar covering Buy Now conversion.

The majority of purchases made online in the United States are paid using credit or debit cards. Worldwide, however, other payment methods are more popular. In fact, in some countries, less than half of purchases are made via credit card. E-Commerce outlets that don’t take these other payment methods into account are actively limiting their income potential.

Plimus has been working hard to continue to evolve the platform to meet your needs and help you to grow your revenues. Today's product release includes a slate of brand new features, capabilities and interfaces available to you through the Control Panel.

You can view the highlights of the release in this short Flash presentation, or read on.

This has been an especially busy week at Plimus. On Sunday 26th April we released our new Network Sales initiative and on Thursday 30th April we have the second webinar session in our Take Charge Spring Series 2009, on Subscriptions.

We have known for some time that the online purchase process is fundamentally different to the offline process. Oddly enough, we often leverage this inefficiently, as evidenced by the relative rarity of impulse offers.

We have received positive reactions from Plimus Vendors and Affiliates regarding the graphic changes in the Plimus Control Panel area.

Just in case you have not noticed, the Plimus designers were busy before this week’s launch updating the icons in the Payment Icons Wizard tool to match our new branding.

Here’s a graphic showing some of the new variants.

As part of the first step in upgrading and expanding our Vendor and Affiliate user area, we are about to launch a refreshed look and feel of the "Control Panel" section.

The Plimus designers and developers have been busy putting this new version together. To help ease the change over, this edition retains all the layout and functionality of the existing platform, but introduces a new design theme.

We just got back from Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas - what a great crowd of people, let me just say!

A lot of people talked about PayPal, both its benefits and its limitations. 

PayPal is like a really easy payment gateway.  Once you've collected all your customer's data, you simply request money from PayPal and they either approve or deny. 

The trouble folks run into is that E-Commerce demands a whole lot more than simply grabbing money from customers.  You need to be able to satisfy requirements PayPal simply doesn't provide, like: