How the Shopzilla Publisher Program Works

How do Publishers make money?
In order to help Publishers understand how our program works, we have illustrated the steps involved in generating earnings.

1.    You place Shopzilla Publisher Program banners or links on your website. A visitor comes to your website, sees a product they would like to compare prices on.

2.    They click on one of the Shopzilla Publisher Program banners or links (*on your Portal report, this represents a ‘click’). This takes them to BizRate, our sister website, where they see a list of relevant products and prices.

3.    Once they decide which product suits them best, they click on a link that takes them through to the website of the Merchant selling that product.

4.    The Merchant pays Shopzilla for valid, CPC-monetized leads and celebrates the sale of a product from the quality traffic you, the Publisher, sent to their website.

5.    Shopzilla shares the revenue generated from this quality traffic with you, the Publisher.* Now YOU celebrate!

 

Should you have any questions, visit our Frequently Asked Questions section, or, post a comment since another Publisher may be wondering something similar. The Shopzilla Publisher Team will be sure to reply.

* All publisher earnings are subject to validation and adjustments.  Portal reported earnings should only be considered as an estimate.  Publishers should consult the Shopzilla, Inc. Publisher Program Terms & Conditions for more information.

Comments

[Talia Drake]

English-Lessons: The only time the Shopzilla Publisher Program earns money is when a merchant pays us for clicks to their site. That money is what we can then pay out to our Publishers. Any other navigation around BizRate will not result in earnings for the Publisher.

If you would like to talk a little more about your particular concerns, please email me directly at tdrake@shopzilla.com. We can see if there are some better merchants or landing pages that you could link to.

[English-Lessons]

Thanks for the clarification. Looking at the Bizrate landing page, I see that there are text ads on that page. Does the publisher get a cut of earnings if the user clicks on one of those instead of through to the product at a merchant site? I ask becuase the products in my niches tend to be available only at one store, with a big red unhappy face marking it... so I can see why users are not likely to clickthrough from BizRate to the merchant. They are clicking my ads to get to BizRate, but then they stop there.

[Talia Drake]

Tim: That is correct. Thanks for clarifying! If a user clicked only as far as Shopzilla/BizRate, no earnings would be generated. This is because Shopzilla would not earn any money for this click. You make money for clicks sent to the merchants who pay Shopzilla for click traffic. If Shopzilla makes no money, we have nothing to pay out to our Publishers.

We have ads that take users to BizRate.com and ads that go directly to the user. It is up to you try out our different link options and find the ads that work best for your website.

Publishers are not paid for sales, as this is a CPC (pay per click) program. We only evaluate sales data to determine Publishers traffic quality and conversions.

[Tim]

English-Lessons : You can have clicks that do not generate any income if they follow step 1 and step 2, but do not complete step 3. So the visitor can come to your site, click on a banner, but then not click through on a merchant link.

I think that type of activity would generate a click, but no earnings.

[English-Lessons]

" The Merchant pays Shopzilla for valid, CPC-monetized leads and celebrates the sale of a product from the quality traffic you, the Publisher, sent to their website."

That part is not so clear. I get a lot of clicks that generate $0.00 -- they don't seem to be fraudulent, so what is it that the end user must do on the website they arrive at in order for money to trickle back to me as a publisher?