Unlike Pay per Click (PPC) programs like Google Adsense, where converting a visitor to a sale depends on the landing page, product features and prices and is the responsibility of the merchant, in affiliate programs, the affiliate spends his/her time and money getting visitors to the merchants website. The affiliate is only paid when a sale is made. Even then, many merchants will avoid paying commissions to their affiliates.

Some of the reasons why commissions are not paid to affiliates despite making sales:
1. For expensive products, the visitor may not make a purchase the first time he/she visits the merchants website. After several visits and comparisons with other similiar products, a purchase decision may be made. Most sales are tracked by the cookie and if the buyer deletes the cookie before making the purchase, the affiliate is not credited the sale, though he/she has sent the visitor to the merchants website.

2. Sometimes, the tracking cookie expires after 30 days, but the visitor sent by the affiliate makes a purchase at a later date, so the affiliate is not credited for the sale.

3. Since no one tracks or monitors the dishonest merchants, some merchants do not credit their affiliates for sales by giving a variety of reasons. Most affiliate marketers learn to avoid such merchants after a few bad experiences.

Most companies selling products or services offline, offer incentives to their sales staff to increase their sales. Similarly their commission agents are paid a percentage of the sale amount. Online, few companies have a dedicated sales staff. They usually specialise in development and support of a product and the marketing is done by the affiliates

Currently the affiliate programs available can be classified as:

1. Affiliate networks like Clickbank, ShareaSale, Commission Junction, LinkShare. You can sign up for the affiliate network and are assigned a user id. You then sign up for individual products depending on the subject of the website or type of traffic you are able to send. The payment to the affiliate is usually handled by the affiliate network, which sends a consolidated check for all sales.
2. Affiliate programs for individual merchants : Most companies selling products online have an affiliate program, where the affiliate selling a product or service is provided a tracking id and is paid for every sale which is made through the tracking id. Payments are made directly by the merchant. The amount paid per sale is higher, but there are many dishonest merchants who avoid paying any commission to their affiliate by not tracking sales correctly.

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