Verticals
E-commerce
Online retail sales as an affiliate vertical, distinct from lead-gen or deposit-based offers.
E-commerce as an affiliate vertical means promoting online retail sales — marketplaces, DTC brands, and store offers paying a percentage of the basket or a fixed fee per purchase. It is distinct from lead-gen and deposit-based verticals because the conversion is a completed retail transaction, usually paid upfront by card rather than COD.
Buyers approach e-commerce with mostly white-hat mechanics: clean creatives, real product claims, and platform-compliant funnels, which makes it a lower-margin but far more stable business than grey verticals. Revenue concentrates around sale events — Black Friday, 11.11, seasonal peaks — and coupon or cashback sub-affiliates compete for last-click attribution. The pitfall is thin commissions meeting rising CPMs: without strong AOV or repeat-purchase deals, paid traffic barely breaks even.
In buyer speech
“E-commerce margins are boring until Q4 — then the Black Friday coupon flows do half the year's profit in three weeks.”