This was posted last year by Glen in the Full Service Avenue Shops Facebook Community group and we are making it more accessible by adding it to the Help Center.

We are announcing new guidelines around Affiliate Programs and selling on Third Party websites like Jane, Amazon, etc.

First, a little background on why we are making these changes.

We Support Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs are awesome! We want to make it clear that we support our shops having Affiliate Programs. The ability to extend your marketing reach with affiliates promoting your shop is a marketing strategy many shops value.

And what you value, we value.

We just want to make sure the Affiliate Programs we allow align with two other important Ave values

Setting Shops Up For Success

One of the things we value deeply is setting you, our wonderful customers, up for success. An important way we do this is by limiting the total number of shops we allow in each county.

The goal of this rule is to limit over-saturation. We don't want too many shops in an area promoting the same items (with the same photographs and descriptions).

While affiliates don't get all the benefits a paying Ave customer does, they do have the opportunity to make money promoting Ave products using our pics and descriptions.

It's therefore important to us to have some say in how our products, photographs, descriptions, and other assets are used by affiliates.

Protecting the Ave Brand

Our goal is to make Ave the premier full-service drop-shipper for boutiques, with the best tech, assets, and support.

Since affiliates represent your brand, by extension they represent Ave as well. So, it's important to us that we are being represented in ways we are comfortable with.

One of the ways some Affiliate Programs reflect poorly on Ave is when they appear to outside observers to be MLMs. This occurs when affiliates can not only earn commissions from sales they generate themselves but can also earn commissions from sales generated by affiliates they refer. Sometimes these "sub-affiliate" commissions are paid several levels deep, which closely resembles an MLM downline.

Many current and prospective customers have reacted negatively when they see Ave products promoted by shops that have Affiliate Programs that appear to be MLMs.

While we understand that MLMs are a popular business structure for many reasons, it’s important to us that Ave is not viewed as an MLM. And it’s important that our products are not promoted by companies with an MLM structure.

It is also our official policy that selling on third party websites like Jane and Amazon will not be allowed. It can lead to an over-saturation of our photos and assets, and creates a competitive market where multiple boutiques are promoting the exact same products and photos to the same customer base.

To help support these values, on October 15, 2022, the following guidelines around Affiliate Programs will go into effect:

For a vast majority of shops, their existing Affiliate Program already meets these guidelines and no changes are needed.

If you have an Affiliate Program that does not meet these new guidelines, we recognize these changes may be tough to hear. We want to give you a good amount of time to meet the new guidelines, so you have until October 15, 2022 to make needed changes.

Effective October 1, 2022 sales through third party websites like Jane and Amazon will not be permitted.

If you have questions or concerns please send a chat so we can respond to your specific questions and situation.