What is JVZoo?
What’s behind the clever name and a nondescript interface?
JVZoo is an affiliate marketing platform that allows sellers to easily list, promote, and sell their products, and affiliate marketers to easily find interesting products at great prices to promote.
With JVZoo, INSTANT is the word.
And that sounds like music to my ears.
As an affiliate marketer, I’ve adjusted very quickly and comfortably to see the following in my email box:
No more wondering if you are making any sales.
No more waiting for a monthly “paycheck”.
No more checking gazillion different affiliate platforms to see why you haven’t gotten paid yet.
How to Use JVZoo as an Affiliate
First things first: here’s what you need to know before you sign up as an affiliate with JVZoo.
1. Affiliate Cookies
This is one of the most important things for you as an affiliate: how far will your referral to a JVZoo vendor go?
Generally, when anyone arrives to a product sales page via your affiliate link, their information is collected and stored as a cookie tagging them as YOUR referral.
Those cookies can last for as long or as short as the affiliate marketing platform allows it.
Take Amazon.com, for instance.
They’ll pay you commission for ANY product your referral buys from them; HOWEVER, your cookie will last for 24 hours only.
With JVZoo, every time you send a referral to one of their vendors, you are automatically cookied for any other products that vendor might list with them – current or future.
For instance, a buyer purchases product A through your affiliate link.
Suppose at a later date, they decide to buy product B from the same vendor.
Even though you haven’t directly referred the buyer to that specific product, you’ll still get paid commission on that sale.
The same with products C,D,E, etc.
For life.
2. Instant Affiliate Payments
Many affiliate marketing programs run on a rotation payment system.
In practical terms, this means that you will get credit for every other sale.
But what happens when you made only one sale?
That’s right, you don’t get paid.
And when you make three sales?
You get credit for only one of them.
With JVZoo, you get paid for every sale.
That’s right, instantly.
3. No Additional Fees
There are absolutely no fees you, an affiliate marketer, need to pay to be a JVZoo affiliate.
4. Great Tracking of Sales and Stats
Whether you care about stats or not, you’ll get plenty of them with JVZoo.
First, you’ll get plenty of stats to help you choose the best converting and/or most popular offers.
With thousands of affiliate products under one roof, these statistics can definitely come in handy.
Once you start making sales, you’ll also be notified of every click, sale, or sniff in your direction:
5. Niche Galore
One of the biggest monetization mistakes I see many bloggers make is promoting unrelated products.
No wonder no one is buying!
This is actually one of the biggest reasons I decided to do a JVZoo review: to show you that this is a great platform to find targeted products YOUR readers will be interested in.
JVZoo’s current marketplace lists products in 21 categories, like:
- Business/Finance
- Cooking/Food
- Employment
- Health/Fitness
- Home/Family
- Sports
…just to name a few.
Take a look at their marketplace for the whole spread.
6. Dimesales
The product sale starts at a certain price point and goes up automatically at different increments after a certain number of sales are made.
What it means to you as an affiliate marketer is the fact that it creates insane scarcity.
You have to admit that seeing this on your screen definitely makes you think twice before passing such a great deal that will be gone forever after X sales:
Ahhh, the power of limited supply!
6. Second Tier Commissions
I couldn’t find any concrete information of whether they are any kind of second tier commissions with JVZoo.
However, they do provide you with “Your JVZoo Referral URL” under “Personal information“, which leads me to believe there’s some benefit in referring affiliates to them.
And so if you sign up with JVZoo following my links, I might actually get paid.
Things to Note
There are a few things about JVZoo that might leave some of you out:
- All payments are made via PayPal, which means that if PayPal is not available in your country, JVZoo is not a good fit for you.
- Vendor approval: you have to apply to be an affiliate to each specific vendor and have to be approved by them before you can promote their products.
- Refunds:just because you are paid instantly, it doesn’t mean you are immune to refunds. In case of a refund request, JVZoo will take money out of your PayPal account just as quickly as they put it in.
- Junk offers:as with any other affiliate program, it’s not all gold that glitters. Adding a product to the database is very easy, which means there will be plenty of products that I would never offer to my readers. Be discerning and don’t loose your readership over a few dollars.
How to Sign Up
That’s the easy part:
- Go to: http://www.jvzoo.com/
- Click on:
- Scroll down until you see a pretty green button that says “Sign up now”.
How to Use JVZoo as a Seller
I am not a seller with JVZoo, but the ones I know aren’t complaining.
Some of the best perks of using them as a seller:
- It’s free to create a product with them.
- You don’t need a website to have a product – create your landing page through JVZoo.
- Instantly create an affiliate program for your products.
- Create One Time Offers and Dimesales – free.
- Total cost of use – no upfront fees and 5% or $17 flat fee (includes OTO).
I know which affiliate platform I’ll be using to promote my first product with…
To sign up for JVZoo as a seller, go to: http://www.jvzoo.com/ and click on:
JVZoo Ad Manager Plugin
This plugin is a great way to promote your JVZoo affiliate products without breaking a sweat.
JVZoo Ad Manager provides a feed of your approved affiliate products on your blog.
You have a choice of placing the feed
- in the header (not recommended by Ana – your readers and Google will not thank you for it);
- above the post (not recommended, but if you must, make sure it doesn’t go between the title and the content – might be a Panda or Penguin invitation);
- below the post;
- in the footer;
- in the sidebar.
The plugin is embedded with your JVZoo affiliate ID, so if anyone signs up because of the plugin, you’ll get paid when they get paid.
It wasn’t very clear that this plugin existed or where to find it, so after some digging around, I found it under “My Account”.
You have to scroll down till you see JVZoo Ad Manager has moved. Click Here link.
You can also use the shortcode [jvzoo] to display the JVZoo Affiliate Feed anywhere in wordpress that shortcodes are allowed – like in the middle of a post, when appropriate.
Marketing Takeaway
Plan of action:
>>>Sign up to become a JVZoo affiliate now
Welcome to the herd!
Hmmm, interesting post, so now I have a question (of course!) You mentioned if I click through to a JVZoo product through one of your links, I am automatically associated to ‘you’. So if I go back at a later date to buy something totally unrelated through someone else, ‘you’ still get accredited with the sale… IF it is the same vendor? (Poor other affiliate!) So is that cookie embedded on my computer, or is it associated with my IP? I.E. How do I get rid of ‘You’? (Not that I would want to of course!) Do I do it ‘on purpose’ by clearing my cache, or ‘accidentally’ by changing my IP address? (I live in one of those hapless areas where the internet goes down about 10 X a day – particuarly when it’s raining :))
And how does that work on WSO promotions, do you know? i.e. I regularly buy stuff through different affiliates, and sometimes I choose the affiliates I want to buy through (cos I like them!) Are you saying that even though I may click on X affiliates link, it is Y affiliate who gets paid – unbeknown to me?
… There’s a challenging conundrum for you to work you way through! – Thank you and Have fun!
(p.s. loved the title of the post – you definitely have the knack of writing ‘clickable’ titles!)
Curiosity killed the cat, Mandy! 😉
To be quite honest with you, I can only speculate on how things work out in your scenarios; I don’t make it a point to dig into any specific affiliate network that deeply, or it’ll drive me nuts!
So from what I understand, you are cookied for a specific vendor. I am not sure how exactly those cookies are tracked.
I do however clear my cookies every once in a while, especially when I want to make sure a specific affiliate gets the commission. Whether it actually happens in practice or not, I don’t know, but at least I make an effort.
As I previously said, now I am moving toward affiliate marketing, so will give it a try (the instant payment feature is really awesome).
BTW: what about the quality product availablity in JVZOO
Well some vendors get penalized and accused of questionable activities due to something some unethical affiliates did and this was meant to sort of combat that. See the aff links always point to the vendors site so anything the affiliates do look as if it’s the vendor who did it.
As a vendor you can set up auto approval for instant commissions for all affiliates or certain ones but I found even with the auto approve option I still had to go in check to see who requested an aff link.
And though it can be a bit annoying as an affiliate to get your link only for it to read “Your Payment Can Be Delayed Up To 60 Days” you can contact the vendor and request for them to remove it after you’ve proved to send legitimate traffic and most of them will remove it..
Or if you’re a marketer with a bit of clout -like you Ana 🙂 you can tell them to please remove delayed status so that you can immediately begin promoting and most will oblige.
Try them out as a vendor Ana by perhaps putting together a package about successful blogging and maybe add a theme template pack and I’ll be one of your affiliates. Just please remove delayed status from me 🙂
That makes sense, Caleb – I suppose it pays to take a look at who is applying to be an affiliate instead of just auto-approving everyone.
I think you might have to butter me up a bit more before I let you have your aff commissions… lol
I’m surprised you’re just now writing about JV Zoo Ana, I figure you would have been all over this a while ago! Even I went ahead a few weeks back and put a product up as a vendor and recently added one more.
And though they aren’t the only game in town as there’s Digi Results, PayDotCom, PaySpree, etc. JV Zoo is getting the most glory plus they sinc well with WSO’s.
Another thing they have that is great for blog owners is a nifty plugin that allows you to display their products which relate to your niche on your blog either under or above posts or even on a standalone page within your blog like how I do on my Secret Resources page 😉
I suppose none of the products I promoted in the past were set up through JVZoo, Caleb, but I am glad I finally learned about them.
Hi Ana – I’m a recent visitor to your site and I like the way you write. I’m also a newbie Affiliate marketing. I’ve produced a product first – I figure most things will be easier! lol
This was useful info, but to clarify, is Click bank the only company that is involved in information products? We have our product approved for them, but we’ve hesitated so far to actually start selling there..
Caroline
Sounds like you went about it the right way, Caroline – put in the effort to create your own product first. I am still dragging my feet…
No, Clickbank is not the only game in town for info products. You can choose just about any affiliate platform, including JVZoo, to sell and offer an affiliate program through.
Perfect timing, my task this week is to find and set up a suitable affiliate network to promote my first online course, I’ll check them out today! I’ll use your link too, would be interested to find out if you earn any commission from me! 🙂
lol, Nick – thanks; it’ll go straight to the “pay the mortgage” fund.
I’ve been in and set up the first product, it’s really really easy and free to set up which is good. One thing I don’t understand and this may go for all affiliate networks, is how that integrates with my membership site? I’m using Premise from Copyblogger Media which essentially creates the person who purchase a product with a WordPress user account and you can control access to what programs they get access to through WordPress. If you use an affiliate to get sales and then the customer purchases through the affiliate program lets say JVZoo, they are then forwarded to a ‘thankyou’ page of some description that then gives a link to the product, it cuts out the wordpress account creation steps… I have spoken to Copyblogger and they say they have no system to integrate, JVZoo haven’t responded to my enquiry so I’m unsure how it links together! Any thoughts on this? I can’t be the first to have experienced this!
I wish I could help, Nick, but I have no idea.
Let’s see if anyone of my more educated on the topic commentators might be able to answer that for you.
Hi Ana,
It took me a bit to get to your JVZoo post. I’m an affilaite with them, Clickbank, and PaySpree.
I’ll have to admit I just joined JV and had not given that much thought beyond the “marketing” products there. PaySpree is a little more familiar to me.
PaySpree does function like you said: rotating the entire sale between the seller and the affiliate. I kind of prefer that as an affiliate and a seller. I just look for a minimum of 50% commission level products that are worth promoting.
And yes, it is very wise to leave your commissions in an account until the refund date is past. It doesn’t necessarily have to be their account if an affiliate is concerned about missing out on the “big” interest rates we can pull down on % of sales. For what you’d gain, until you hit major sales it’s not worth the hassle of moving money very often.
A good thing about JV Zoo is as a vendor you have the ability to delay payments to affiliates for up to 60 days or until you become more familiar with them until payment is made to them.
I had no idea you could do that with JVZoo, Caleb – so it’s up to the vendor to pay instant commissions or delay paying? Doesn’t seem to be fair to affiliates.
Hi Ana,
The delayed commissions are set when the affiliate is approved and the affiliate is made aware if they are on instant or delayed before they begin to promote. We show vendors how many sales affiliates have made across the network to help them make a decision on if they should put a certain affiliate on delayed or instant payments.
There is also a built in messaging system to let the vendor and affiliate converse back and forth with each other to build trust, etc. We’ve found vendors like the ability to build trust with affiliates first when they are new to promoting their products.
Thanks for the write up about JVZoo, I enjoyed reading it:)
Bryan Zimmerman
CEO JVZoo
Thanks for the clarification and for stopping by, Bryan.
Haven’t heard about PaySpree, Rob; thanks for the tip.
Hi Ana
This is a great tool and thanks for such an awesome review….For someone like me who is just a content marketer,this is one tool to look out for
You can certainly use it as an affiliate promoting other people’s products, David.
Hey Ana,
another awesome & comprehensive post, thanks for sharing this. I’m assuming from the way you’ve written this that the JVZoo features you mention aren’t available via things like Clickbank.
I’ve never really considered affiliate marketing but now you’ve got me wondering. Even if I weren’t to promote other’s products, perhaps I could sell my own books & e-courses on there.
I don’t use too many affiliate networks, Alan, but none of the ones I use or have used offer things like instant commissions.
I think you should definitely consider affiliate marketing; at least, till you are ready with your own products.
Actually I already have my own products, just never thought of marketing them via affiliate networks.
Oops, my bad.
no worries 😉
I hardly ever promote them anyway – even to my own list!
Hi Anna,
Thanks for mentioning and reviewing the network. As for some reason I have not yet heard or read about the specific network. Will be sure to look at a couple of reviews and peer recommendations.
I have some questions, Ana.
1) You wrote:
Which affiliate programs do that? I have not come across that before.
2) You mention lifetime cookies. Are you saying that JVZoo uses first click attribution and once a buyer has EVER clicked ANY affiliate link anywhere that theoretically they are YOURS for life – and no other affiliate has a chance?
To clarify, affiliate programs either credit a sale to the FIRST click or the LAST click. This is an important distinction – especially if you are active in the CommentLuv community and your readers are likely to have seen and clicked on multiple CommentLuv Premium offers.
If they use first click attribution the first blog they visited and clicked on gets credit for the sale. If they use last click the LAST blog they visited gets credit for the sale. BUT….and this is a BIG BUT…
With the growing number of devices affiliates are far less likely to get credit for ANY sale because the buyer may have clicked your link on their laptop and then purchased on their desktop – or clicked your link on their cell phone and then bought on their tablet. Hopefully you get the idea.
Getting paid also assumes that buyers do not delete cookies for any reason between clicking and buying. There are drawbacks to either the seller or the affiliate no matter how a program is set up. For example:
This favors the affiliate over the seller because they’re paying out a commission even if you never promote anything for them ever again. On the other hand, maybe you DID send them that buyer so you DO deserve the credit. Without interviewing the buyer – and them remembering clearly (not likely) we will never know.
INSTANT affiliate payments are the best benefit to using JVZoo because they are highly motivating for affiliates. They are far more likely to focus on promotions for the seller when they can earn money right away from their efforts.
The requirement to provide W-9 data immediately is a drawback though because some may not be able to do that and would never have hit the amount required so you are going to lose them as potential affiliates. If JVZoo could let an affiliate earn up to the earnings limit where a W-9 is necessary you could get more affiliates on board faster.
Thanks for taking your time with this, Gail.
1. I am not so much about affiliate networks as I am about the products.
Even though Clickbank has a bad reputation (I personally have never had problems with it), if a seller of a good product chooses to use them, I’ll still promote the product.
I don’t get into the intricacies of how the commissions are paid. I’ve made plenty of sales that I never saw a dime for. Which particular programs? No idea at this point.
2. Again, as affiliates, we are at the mercy of which platform a seller chooses to use to promote their products. Whether it’s fair or not, I don’t have a say and neither do I really want to.
If I don’t like the way the commission structure is set, I don’t promote the product. If a seller doesn’t like (or feels it’s unfair) any specific affiliate platform, they won’t choose it.
In the end, we have no control over our referrals or which cookie is used to track the sale. Just or unjust, that’s the nature of affiliate marketing. I don’t really care. As long as I choose to use affiliate marketing as part of my income generation, I am willing to put up with certain problems I might run into.
I don’t actually know of many affiliate networks that use rotating payments (and my understanding is that PayPal doesn’t like it when you do), but I know Rapid Action Profits and the 7 Dollar Secrets script both use it. It can also be done with the (now opensource) Butterfly Marketing script. While I’m not a huge fan of PayPal, I think using their new adaptive payments the way JVZoo does is a much better option.
With instant commissions using PayPal adaptive payments, the requirement to give your W-9 information up front makes sense. The only other alternative would almost definitely mean a lot of affiliates losing any commissions they earned between the time they hit the earnings limit and the time they actually submit the W-9 information.
Thanks for the additional info, Steven.
I agree about W-9 – as U.S. affiliates, we expect that from any program we choose to promote and it shouldn’t exclude anyone not living within the United States. Doing it upfront just makes sense.
wow Ana this is awesome and super helpful… I am going to sign up for sure. Thanks for continuing to blog value!
Geoff
Great tip, Ana. I will check them out. 🙂
Hello Ana,
Thank you for this post. This is really a great information, I was looking for.
Hi Ana, this is such an informative post. To be very frank I was not aware of JVZoo. I am looking forward to check it out. The 6 tips are great. May be our clients would get more sales optimizing this JVZoo…..thanks once again.
Jvzoo is really amazing! I launched a product on their platform about a month ago and everything went extremely smooth.
I highly recommend using them. It’s also a great way to make some nice instant commissions as an affiliate 🙂
Thanks Joshua, glad to hear everything went smoothly for you. We try to make sure everyone has a good experience and if there are issues that our support staff gets it taken care of quickly.
Bryan Zimmerman
CEO JVZoo
Hi Ana
Thank you for this post. I was recently looking around the a internet marketing forum recently and came across jvzoo. Never thought of trying it until now. I have since the past worked primarily with Amazon and Ebay but I must say the commission is useless for the time spent. Maybe jvzoo can offer some new things. Thanks!
I know what you mean about Amazon, Tim – you really need to do ton of volume to see much difference.
heard of jvzoo from simmeon before but i never really got time untill andy bailey from commentluv started using it for his promotion , it seems pretty sleek and finally we have a affiliate system which pays through paypal !
already started using it promoting products from wso forum , conversion rates are awesome on wso forum as its a forums and buyer gets to see other people comments in real time.
I need to start using WSO more; sounds like a great way to create more buzz.
Thanks for this great overview of JVZoo, Ana. I’ve purchased a number of items through affiliate links on their platform and have never had a problem with the system. It’s been a while since I looked at their marketplace and was pleased to see it expanding.
I was initially attracted to them for many of the advantages you mentioned in your post but they fell off my radar for awhile. Thanks for shining a spotlight on them… I really need to check them out again.
thanks for introducing this as I hadn’t heard about it. I always wondered who would take the plunge and develop a robust affiliate program management system *from an end user’s perspective*, not from vendors/companies’ perspective.
will certainly give it some more read. I agree that the application is universal
Definitely a thumbs-up from me, Sunil.