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TonerTopUp
supplies toner refills for laser printers, fax machines and copiers from
the UK. We supply bottles of toner and laser printer refill kits to make
refilling cartridges easy. Laser toner cartridges can be simply refilled
several times to save you money. Environmentally friendly! We supply HP
Hewlett Packard Brother Canon Epson Lexmark Konica Minolta QMS OKI Samsung
Xerox laser refill toner and many other types! |
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TonerTopUp Affiliate Sales Program Frequently Asked Questions - (FAQ)
You will find information about affiliate sales programs marketing in general and how our program fits in to this area of marketing on our Affiliate Sales Programs Marketing Introduction page. This is a good place to start exploring our program. Our page specifically about our Affiliate Sales Program is probably a good place to continue! This page contains detailed information on our Affiliate Sales Program in the form of answers to frequently asked questions. The actual Affiliate Program Agreement shows the legal contract. (A bit harder reading!) Finally you sign up as an Affiliate on our Affiliate sales program registration form.
The Questions Selling TonerTopUp Refill Toner Why do people want TonerTopUp products? What is the hardest part of selling TonerTopUp refill toner as Affiliate Sales? What proportion of visitors actually buy from your website and the average order size? Earning Commissions Can I earn money without any effort on affiliate sales programs? How much will I make from being an affiliate? Can I get paid when no one is buying anything? What happens if a customer orders over the phone instead of on the website? Do you pay the same commission on all products? What are the commission rates? How do you pay your affiliates? When will the commissions be paid each month? Is this a Residual Income or one time pay out income for a customer? How do you track my referrals and customers? How long does the affiliate code cookie persist on the prospect's computer? Can I get commission on an existing account? What happens if the customer uses a different email address? Will I benefit from encouraging sub-affiliates? Signing Up to the TonerTopUp Affiliate Sales Program Can I sign up as a company rather than in my personal name? How old do I need to be to participate? Can people from any country participate in the TonerTopUp Affiliate Sales Program? Security and Legality Is this Multilevel (Network) Marketing (MLM)? Is it legal and ethical? Is your site secure for credit card handling? Is my personal information secure? Marketing as an Affiliate Can I send “SPAM” emails? Can I advertise? Information provided Are there tax advantages to doing this affiliate program? What is my affiliate Code and why? How will I know who has signed up in my organisation? What information do you provide to your members?
The Answers! See also our page giving a complete description of the Affiliate Program Why do people want TonerTopUp products? Let's be straight about it! The main reason by far that people buy our refill toner is that it saves them a lot of money. Look at our home page! Its all about saving! Money is the big motivator. In addition to that, but coming very much second, is that fact that it is great for the environment. Every bottle of refill toner that we sell prevents a lot of raw and scarce materials being used to make yet another cartridge and, at the other end, prevents one more cartridge being dumped as land fill. It's friendly at both ends. REUSE is second only to REDUCE in the environmentalist mantra! A lot of people and organisations are keen to do what they can to help our poor old earth survive as well as possible the ravages of our civilisation! What is the hardest part of selling TonerTopUp refill toner? It is getting people to consider the idea. It just does not cross the mind of most people that such an alternative exists! Empty cartridges go in the bin! ...either the rubbish bin or just possibly the recycling bin! Sow the seed and many will give it a go! Many people who try it will come back again and again as they get used to saving money.
What proportion of visitors actually buy from your website and the average order size? Our website attracts a good return rate. About 20% of our visitors revisit the website on a second or further subsequent occasions over a two month period. Because a high proportion of our customers return for repeat purchases, a straight forward visitor conversion rate is a bit misleading. As you get new customers, many will stick and return for repeat purchases on which you will continue to earn residual commissions. However the ratio of unique visitors to orders placed in a month is approximately 1 order to 50 unique visitors. As less than a third of our site views are from visitors based in the UK, the conversion rate from UK visitors is roughly three times this. This gives a solid conversion rate for visitors sent to the website. The average order size is £84 GBP plus Vat and carriage. (Figures correct January 2006) (Please contact us if you are interested in negotiating a North American TonerTopUp franchise. 55% of our site visitors are from the USA) Can I earn money without any effort? Well not really! This is a self employment opportunity and your earning will depend on the effort you put in. If you have already built up a large network of contacts to whom you can recommend new worthwhile products then you may be able to turn on a flow of income immediately, but this will be a result of your previous hard work. Mostly you have to work at getting traffic to your website, newsletter etc and building your network and then when you have exposure with people who trust what you are saying and the information you are providing, you will benefit from them following your referral links to save themselves money or to join in the network. If you are not sure where to start then we suggest you look at some of the excellent training resources freely available on the Internet which show you in detail how to build up your business in this field. A good place to start is our page on Affiliate Marketing which will give you some ideas and links to get you stared. It is true that this is a business in which your efforts can build up a significant pool of residual income which will continue to provide you with a flow of income without further effort. That is a special kind of magic!
How much will I make from being an affiliate? Maybe nothing! We do not hold out that you will make any particular amount of money because the amount you will make will depend upon how much time and effort you spend and how skillfully you promote TonerTopup refill toner using your referral links. This is not a get rich quick scheme, it is an honest opportunity for self employment! Rewards will only follow effort. Statistically most members in most schemes earn next to nothing because they don't do anything! In fact most never even publish their referral link so they don't stand a chance! We would prefer to discourage you from signing up unless you plan to be active as otherwise it is basically a waste of your time. (and ours!) We will only gain from active members and if we could pre select we would! Unfortunately as is true with much marketing, "Half of what we spend is a waste of money, they only problem is we don't know which half!" Can I get paid when no one is buying anything? No! Unlike some MLM schemes that pay bonuses for recruitment, our referral scheme only pays commissions on actual orders. These commissions are covered by the income from the order and are limited in total for any order to a maximum of 22%. This is the main reason why this is an ethical program and won't fall apart. We all know exactly what is funding the commissions and so do you!
What happens if a customer orders over the phone instead of on the website? We believe that it is important for our business to have a human face in spite of being an Internet business. For that reason we provide our telephone number on every page of our website. Inevitably some customers place their first or subsequent orders over the phone. If they have been initially introduced by you then they are most likely to have a cookie with your affiliate code on their computer. If they have already placed one order online then this will have been recorded against their customer record and you will get commission whether they subsequently order online or by phone. However if they place their first order on the phone, then we have no way of knowing that they were originally referred by you. We can't see the cookie over the phone line! This means that they will not be recorded as your customer. Sorry!
Do you pay the same commission on all products? No! Because the profit margins are smaller on some of our products than on others, we do not pay the same commission on them all. In order to pay the maximum amount that we can afford we apply a scale factor to the selling value to arrive at the commissionable value of the order. Each product has a "scale" factor of 100%, 75%, 50% or 25% depending on the profit margin. It is calculated using a fixed formula. We pay full maximum commissions totalling 22% (Scale factor of 100%) on about 70% of our bottled refill toner products. That is we pay 12% to the first level affiliate, 8% to the second level affiliate and 2% to the third level affiliate. On the other bottled toners and some other subsidiary products, like complete cartridges for instance, we pay a lesser commission because the profit margins are smaller and we cannot afford to pay the full 22% commission. On these products the selling value is multiplied by the scale factor percentage of 75%, 50% or 25% before calculating the commission. (For commission we exclude post and packing charges and Value Added Tax on all orders.) This enables us flexibility to offer customers products at tighter margins if necessary and yet pay really good commissions where we can afford it.
What are the commission rates? The rates are 12% for commissions made using your own member Code, plus 8% for commissions to you for orders made by your first level downline plus 2% of orders made by your second level downline. So it is in your interest to get others to sign on as Affiliates and to encourage them to recruit as well. All the commissions are paid on the "scaled" sales using the scale factor associated with the particular product. As described above, about 70% of our refill toner products have 100% scale factors and pay the full maximum % commissions totalling 22% of the sales value to the three affiliates who may have contributed to the sale. The commissions are payable on all sales made at the normal web price. Commission is not payable where the client buys at a trade or other discounted price.
How do you pay your affiliate members? We use either direct transfer to UK bank accounts or PayPal to pay our affiliate members. Non UK members must have PayPal account. When will the commissions be paid each month? TonerTopUp will pay earned commissions to their affiliate members within 30 days after the close of the earned commission month. Commissions must reach £50.00 (GBP) in any pay period in order to be paid in that pay cycle. If your commissions are below £50.00, we will hold them until you reach £50.00. For example, a member earns commissions in the month of March. He/She will receive the March commissions before the end of April provided the payment is at least £50 (GBP).
Is this a Residual Income or one time pay out income for a customer? The 3 level commissions are residual income. Once a customer is on our database with your affiliate code, you will continue to be paid commission for the life of the program on all successive orders so long as you are a member. Since the product is a repeat purchase consumable this is most important! However if you do not earn any commission for 12 months you will cease to be an affiliate.
How do you track my referrals and customers? We use a combination of a website database and cookies to do the best job we can to track all referrals. When you refer a prospect to our website, the landing page extracts your member code from the referral URL and immediately writes the information into a Cookie on the visitor's machine. (Providing there is not already a Cookie there!) It also retains the member code as a session variable for the duration of the session. If an order is placed during the session and the customer's email address is not already in our customer database, then your member code, along with any codes for your "father" and "grandfather", who are also entitled to commission, are written to the new customer record using the email address as the unique identifier. In the same way, if your prospect signs up as an affiliate, your code is written as their "father" code and your "father" code as their "grandfather." If the prospect does not place an order or sign up on their first visit, but returns to our website at a later date without using your referral URL, then the landing page checks to see whether the visitor has a Cookie from a previous visit. If so, the referral code from the Cookie is used (and takes priority over a referral URL code) as the Affiliate referring the customer. You will therefore get long term benefit from your referral even if the prospect takes a while to act. You will also generally get commission if your customer uses another email address and so opens a second record in our customer list.
How long does the members code cookie persist on the prospect's computer? We set the cookie to last for a year. However Cookies are not foolproof as you can set your browser not to accept Cookies. There is little we can do about this. Can I get commission on an existing account? Not normally! If you think there is a good reason why you should get commissions on an account that has already been set up without your commission code, email us and we will consider it. We can manually set the commission code on an account if we want to.
What happens if the customer uses a different email address? Because we use the email address as the unique client identifier this will effectively set up a new account. However the client should still have the Cookie on their computer and so this account too will be marked for commission.
Will I benefit from encouraging sub-affiliates? Yes, if they or their sub-affiliates make sales (or buy themselves). You will not benefit from inactive affiliates however. The point of having 3 levels of commission is to enable you to benefit from recruiting more affiliates and so encourage you to do this. Even if you make no direct commissions yourself, you can benefit from those below you (your downline.) Some are better at recruiting and some at selling; you can benefit either way! This is particularly designed for organisations with members or sub-organisations. For instance if you are a school with a website, you may encourage your visitors either to buy toner from your website or sign up themselves as affiliates. Your school will benefit from their activity either way. For instance if you are a national charity you can sign up as an affiliate and encourage your local branches to become sub-affiliates. That way you will benefit from two levels of commission on each order obtained via a branch. Can I sign up as a company rather than in my personal name? You may sign up for the TonerTopUp referral scheme in your company name, we do need to have an individual name and email address as the nominated member. There is an optional Company name box in sign up form. You can then use a company bank account or PayPal account.
How old do I need to be to participate? You must be at least 18 years old.
Can people outside from any country participate in the TonerTopUp referral scheme? Yes, we sell our products worldwide and there is no reason why you cannot do the same from any country. For practical reasons of foreign exchange convenience we will only pay commissions directly to bank accounts in the UK. Otherwise we will pay to a PayPal account. PayPal accounts are simple to set up at www.paypal.com. The majority of our sales are currently in the UK with decreasing amounts as you go further afield. (If you are interested in taking a North American franchise for the TonerTopUp business, or for any other area, please contact us by email.)
Is this Multilevel (Network) Marketing (MLM)? We prefer to call it a multi-level Affiliate program because it is primarily an Affiliate program rather than a typical Multilevel (Network) Marketing scheme. This is however a question of emphasis. Multilevel (Network) Marketing covers a wide range of schemes ranging from the ethical and excellent to the questionable! What distinguishes this scheme (and most Affiliate schemes) from MLM schemes is that: This scheme is primarily about profiting from the selling of our TonerTopUp products. You pay nothing to join it. You pay nothing for promotional materials, samples, initial stock etc. In fact you pay nothing to us or to any member AT ALL. You only expenses will be the time and cost of anything you decide to do to promote selling of our toner refill products or to sign up a downline. The source of commissions is SOLELY from the selling revenue from our popular and environmentally friendly TonerTopUp products! It is totally transparent. It is identical for all members, whenever and however they sign up. There is no advantage gained by "getting in early"! You don't have to be a maths genius to see that the commission structure can be maintained for ever and has no built in tendency to collapse. It is fair, ethical and legal! You never handle the goods, as we deliver to, and collect payment from, the final customer. We don't place huge emphasis on you recruiting in the way that many MLM schemes do. We are quite happy for you to just sell Toner refills.
However...yes, our TonerTopUp scheme is a form of Multilevel Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing. It is so because we choose to offer commission 3 levels deep which gives an incentive for you to recruit a downline. We believe that this can lead to significant growth and residual income for those members who choose to recruit. The Multilevel bit is a powerful multiplier! It is also completely ethical and legal! ......but you can work it just like a single level referral scheme and ignore recruitment completely if you prefer! “If I lost all my money today; I would start or join a successful Network Marketing Business tomorrow” – Donald Trump.
Is it legal and ethical? Yes, it is both legal and ethical. For the the UK Legislative Context please see our page giving a simple explanation from a trading standards website on what is legal. It is ethical because it costs you nothing you only get paid when a real product is sold and from the proceeds of the selling the customer gets a product that saves money at the market price the scheme only pays an affordable commission on selling there is no payment for recruiting other members. Is your site secure for credit card handling? Yes, we use Opayo (Name has changed from Sage Pay in July 2020) as our credit card handlers and we do not see or store any of the sensitive credit card information provided by our customers online. Opayo are major online credit card handlers with an impeccable record. Their website is fully secure. If we are given card details on the phone, we only hold them long enough to process the transaction before they are shredded. We do not wish to be responsible for this critical information in case of the theft of our servers. See our Warranties and Policies page.
Is my personal information secure? We respect your right to privacy and do not pass information on either our customers or associates to any one else. There is one exception for our affiliate program members because, when you sign up on the program, you may have found our website using a link from another member and in this case you will form part of the team ("Downline") of that member and, possibly too, the member who recruited him or her. These are your "Upline" and they will get commission on your selling. Because of this they will have an incentive to help you make a success of your membership. They will be given your name and email address when you sign up. They may well contact you shortly thereafter and possibly offer you assistance. See our Warranties and Policies page. Can I send “SPAM” emails? ABSOLUTELY NO SPAMMING! We absolutely must protect the integrity of this program and our business. If you have any questions about this, please read our Anti-Spam Policy. If we have even a suspicion that a member has used spam we will immediately end their contract and pay no further commissions. We seem to be on just about every spam target list ourselves and so I expect we will notice pretty soon! Our decision on this is final!
Can I advertise? Yes, BUT you cannot make any claims that we do not make in our website, you may not make income potential claims at all, and you must include the fact that you are an “Independent Affiliate” after your name or contact information. You may send email messages to people that you know (and who know you) to advise them about our referral scheme. You may advertise on websites and you may use Pay-per-Click advertising if you wish. (We would prefer that you did not use the same terms that we do!) You may promote by small ads, direct mail, leaflets, press releases, networking and word of mouth.
Are there tax advantages to doing this affiliate program? In the UK and the USA and in most other countries,
any expenses associated with developing and running a business are probably
tax deductible. That can include your computer, an office in your home,
and maybe some travel. That can become pretty exciting if you refer people
who live in Hawaii or other interesting locations! You must consult with
your tax advisor. The tax benefits from having your own business can be
significant!
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TonerTopUp is a trading name of Smith & Young Sales
Ltd Any names used on this web site are used for descriptive
purposes and are hereby expressly acknowledged as the trademarks of
their owner.
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