Affiliate Marketing in Asia, Part 1 of several dozen

I was doing an interview last week for an Asian eMarketing Publication about Affiliate Marketing in Asia. All the usual things were said about language, culture, shopping habits and shipping costs when I suddenly realized I’d been blind.

Contrary to popular belief affiliate marketing has been around in Asia for a long time. But unlike in the USA where most merchants turned to networks to manage their programs, in Asia, everything went in house. It took me a while to understand why, and then it became quite obvious.

One of the largest challenges to launching an affiliate network or program in Asia is language, the other is the depth of e-commerce, or lack of it. Few people shop on line for products, but …. (this was my blind spot)…. they shop online for services , show tickets, air tickets, rentals space, bill payment, hotels…. and especially travel services because they can trancend national boundaries.

Some of the first serious sites in Asia (the world even) to master multilingual content publishing were hotel booking sites…and of course when they decided it was time for them to launch their affiliate programs, they took one look at the market, laughed at what was on offer and launched in house programs and this started well back in early 2000.

The challenge to mange an Asia program doesn’t stop with the content though, nope if you launch a program for a site that has 5 languages, well you’re going to need Affiliate Managers that can support affiliates fluently in 5 languages too, that can answer questions, help newbies and work out why the Korean guy running a data feed for Chinese tourists is having problems with his character sets. You have multi currency payments. How to handle affiliate fraud across multiple countries, e-commerce laws, national censorship and plenty of other little issues that make Asia one of the most complicated places to market anything, never mind run an affiliate program.

I’ve spent some time pondering about what to write on Revenews, everything seems to be covered, except Asia, so I’ll put my main focus here and delve into different countries, challenges and success stories around Asia as best I can, looking at the succes behind some Asia based Affiliates too. I’m eager to hear from Asia based Affiliates, Merchants and Affiliate Managers so please drop me a line, I’ll be very happy to hear from you.

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