9 Must-Haves for Your Affiliate Terms and Conditions
Want to know what you need in your affiliate terms and conditions? These are the essential terms you need for your affiliate program.
Promoting your business with your own affiliate program can be extremely lucrative, but if you’re anything like me, you are researching everything you need to ensure you have everything you need to legally protect your brand’s reputation. As a lawyer myself who drafts contracts for entrepreneurs like you, I am giving you the essential terms you need in your affiliate terms and conditions.
I will tell you what you need in your affiliate terms and conditions, whether purchasing an affiliate program terms and conditions template or grabbing a free affiliate marketing terms and conditions template online. This blog post can serve as your affiliate terms and conditions generator for all the essential terms you need!
After learning about what you need in your affiliate terms and conditions, you will have everything you need to boost your sales while still protecting your brand’s reputation.
This post is all about the critical elements all affiliate terms and conditions must have.
Ultimate Affiliate Terms and Conditions
Affiliate terms and conditions generator
Now, let’s get into what those essential elements are for your affiliate terms and conditions.
1. Protection from copycats
First of all, when you are giving someone the opportunity to promote your stuff, you are also giving them the right to use your name, product/service description and pictures of either you or your products. You give them those rights to use your intellectual property ONLY to promote your stuff.
However, not everyone will have those same intentions with your intellectual property and may use it to copy your stuff and offer those same products/services with the same promo material for their copied version of your products/services.
You need to protect yourself from these copycats. Therefore, you need to include in your affiliate terms and conditions the license to use the intellectual property that you specifically have made available to your affiliates in your affiliate program. Your affiliate terms and conditions must also state what they can be used for, i.e., promoting your stuff and nothing else.
2. Protection from spammers
Now that you have made clear that you only want your affiliates to use the affiliate program for promotional purposes, you need to be clear about how to promote your products/services.
You don’t want your affiliate program to be used for spam. Spamming is when someone sends unwanted and unsolicited messages digitally to the masses. Spamming could be done by email (in bulk) but also on social media posts, forums, and on other people’s websites. Spam could severally hurt your reputation.
Therefore, you must explicitly state in your affiliate terms and conditions that spamming is prohibited. If they promote your products/services in any way that could be considered spam, you can stop your affiliates from promoting your products/services if they do.
3. Protection from disparagement
Speaking of your reputation, you don’t want your affiliates to hurt your brand intentionally.
Your affiliates may not initially set out to hurt your brand, but anything can happen in your relationship with your affiliates. You may have a disagreement or full-on dispute with an affiliate, or the affiliate may suddenly not be happy with your product/service for whatever reason.
In any case, you want to prevent your affiliates from disparaging you or your brand at any point in time.
Therefore, you need to include a prohibition in your affiliate terms and conditions for your affiliates to hurt your name in any way
4. Protection from liars
Disparagement is, in most cases, a flat-out lie, but there are more ways in which an affiliate could lie about you, your brand, or your product, which could be intentional or unintentional.
Someone could exaggerate the benefits of your product/service to the point that it’s actually a lie, for example. Or, an affiliate could mistakenly mention a feature of your product that is not a feature of your product.
For those and other lies, you want to include in your affiliate terms and conditions the obligation for them to correct those issues as soon as possible after you have brought these to their attention.
You don’t want potential customers to go off of information about your products that are simply not true and end up with unhappy customers.
5. Non-compliance with the FTC and EU Commission
Not only do you want to prevent unhappy customers, you definitely don’t want the governmental authorities to be unhappy with you.
When affiliates promote your products/services, they must comply with the rules of the (US) Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and/or the EU Commission. They must inform their audience that they get paid when a sale is made through an affiliate link, and they must do so in the correct manner.
It should not be your responsibility to check whether every affiliate complies with applicable affiliate marketing laws. Thus, you should not be liable for any fines from the FTC or other costs if your affiliate does not comply with these rules.
Therefore, you must include an indemnity and limitations of liability in your affiliate terms and conditions to negate such risks. You’re basically stating that complying with applicable laws is your affiliates’ responsibility, and they should deal with the consequences if they don’t.
6. Monitor what’s happening with your stuff
You may not want to monitor whether your affiliates comply with the FTC rules, but you do want to check whether your affiliates comply with your rules.
Therefore, you want to include the following in your affiliate terms and conditions:
the right for you to inquire about where exactly your affiliate links are used;
the right to access any platforms or locations that may be exclusive, like if your affiliate links are used in your affiliates’ membership programs or courses, for example; and
the obligation of your affiliate to inform you as soon as possible about how your affiliate links are used and provide you access to those exclusive platforms.
7. Whatever you say, it’s not on me
Though you have the power to monitor everything your affiliates are doing, you still will not be able to oversee everything your affiliates say about your brand or product.
So their information may contain lies or incorrect information, and, based on the lies and inaccurate information, your customers may make claims against you.
Again, it’s your affiliates’ responsibility to ensure they provide the correct information, and if they don’t, you should not be the one who is liable for those mistakes or lies.
Therefore, you should also have indemnities and exclusions of liability for third-party claims you get because of incorrect information the affiliate provides about your brand or product.
8. Protection from wrongful money claims
But it might not just be your angry clients who make claims against you; your affiliates could make money claims against you too.
For your affiliate program, you use software from a third-party source to track sales made through your affiliate links. It’s that software that is registering this information, and that software could possibly fail at registering all sales made. The software could have a bug, or there might be a glitch in its functioning.
It could also be that your affiliate is using analytics and believes more sales are made through the affiliate links than might actually be the case.
For whatever reason, your affiliate may believe that sales are made through the affiliate links, while this has not been registered.
The last thing you want is to end up in discussion with your affiliates about whether or not they have a right to a commission. You should be able to go off of whatever information your chosen affiliate program software provides and have those facts be final.
For that reason, you need to include in your affiliate terms and conditions that:
affiliates only get paid a commission when your software says that sales have been made through those affiliate links;
the information your software provides is the only source that determines whether sales are made through the affiliate links, and nothing else can determine that;
you are not responsible for any errors in that software system you use; and
you are not liable to pay any commissions if no sales are registered for whatever reason.
9. Nip it in the bud
I have discussed all the protections you need and a list of all the crap you will not accept from your affiliates. But you also need the correct terms to act upon your affiliates if they do not comply with your rules.
You need terms in your affiliate terms and conditions that ensure that you can:
stop your affiliates from breaking the rules;
make them pay for their mistakes;
completely ban them from the affiliate program; and
stop paying your affiliates.
All that for whatever reason. That’s right. It’s your affiliate program, and while you would not ban your affiliates and not pay them if they are doing great, you do not owe them an explanation if you decide to ban them when they’ve done something you don’t like.
At the end of the day, no affiliate is entitled to be your affiliate; it’s a privilege.
The point of these affiliate terms and conditions is to prevent and stop anything from hurting your brand or costing you any money (beyond fair commissions).
Affiliate program terms and conditions template
If you want an affiliate program terms and conditions template containing all the essentials I just discussed, my affiliate terms and conditions have all of them and more!
My affiliate program terms and conditions template is fully customizable for your affiliate program. You can purchase your affiliate terms and conditions on this page of my contract shop.
My template is not a simple affiliate agreement template nor a one page affiliate agreement template. It is a comprehensive template with everything you need to protect your brand and money!
Free affiliate marketing terms and conditions template
If you already have a template or want to grab a free affiliate marketing terms and conditions template online, then make sure it contains all the essential terms I just discussed. You can use this list as your checklist for your affiliate terms and conditions!
This post was all about the essentials your affiliate terms and conditions must have to protect your brand’s reputation.
You can get your affiliate terms and conditions on this page of my contract shop!
Are you selling digital products? Then you need terms and conditions for your digital products too. You can get my Terms and Conditions for Digital Products on this page!
Are you selling an online course? Then you need terms and conditions for your course. You can get my Terms and Conditions for Online Courses on this page!
