Beso Rewards & Beso Affiliate Program: Frequently Asked Questions

What is Beso Rewards? Heck, what’s Beso?
You can learn more about Beso here, but in short, it’s a website that’s exclusively devoted to shopping ideas and inspiration. Beso is part of Shopzilla Inc, which is a group of consumer shopping web sites, including Bizrate, Shopzilla, and Beso. On Beso, we aggregate products from thousands and thousands of retailers, from well-known department stores to small, independent boutiques, so that you can search a web’s worth of shopping in one place.

The Beso Rewards/Beso Affiliate Program is a PPC (pay-per-click) affiliate program that connects our shopping solution with shopping content from some of the web’s best content creators. Big-time publishers (magazines, bloggers, big websites) use our affiliate program and now, with Beso Rewards, individual users can, too. After all, between Facebook, Twitter, at al, we’re all constantly producing content, whether it’s our day job or not. So why not make money while doing something you already love to do? In short: When you use our links to power your social activities, and your friends and followers and fans click, you share in our PPC (pay-per-click) business model. It’s as simple as that.

Who is eligible to join?
At this point just US Citizens—if you are a bigger publisher from outside of the United States, we might have a solution for you through our Shopzilla Publisher Program.

Is Beso Rewards free, or do I have to pay a fee to join?
It is absolutely free to join and use the program.

How can I tell if I’m signed up for the program?
When you sign up for a Beso account, you automatically receive a Beso Rewards account and unique publisher ID (see below for info on how you can see your unique ID in action on links). If you were a Beso account holder before we launched Beso Rewards, you’ve automatically been enrolled.

How do I use Beso Rewards?
When you sign into your Beso account, and pull a link directly from our search results page (there’s an example of what that looks like below), or use the share icons on the card of the item you’ve chosen, your unique publisher ID will be added to the link, so that we can track your traffic. Sharing is not enough: Your friends and followers must click on your product to trigger the money-generating event. (And clicking on it yourself repeatedly won’t work—we have spam filters in place to ensure that there’s no abuse.) Share only the products you love, and grow your followers organically and without incentivizing them, and you’ll begin to see results.

How much money will I make?
It depends: Retailers bid on different products, so every item on Beso varies. And, to be honest, it depends on the quality of your traffic—again, spamming or sending fraudulent traffic won’t work. A quality Beso Rewards user can expect to make anywhere from $.05 to $.50 per click, depending on how qualified the traffic is. See below for more info on our view of quality.

How do I see how much I’ve earned?
You can view your earnings in a handy little dashboard. On the top right of the Beso homepage, you’ll see My Beso. Click on that, and then Account. Make sure you’re signed in!

How do I get paid?
PayPal. If you don’t have a PayPal account, you can get one for free.

When do I get paid?
We process payments approximately every two to three weeks. It will not be on a set day, but we will do our best to keep to this schedule. We will pay you via Paypal, utilizing the same email address you used for your Beso account. If you have a Paypal account, but it’s not associated with your Beso account email address, you can add it. Follow these Paypal instructions.

I’m sharing products but nothing is happening in my dashboard—what gives?
It could be two things: It might be that nobody is clicking on the products you’ve shared (see below for ideas on getting clicks and building an audience); Or, it might be that either you are not logged into your account, or you’re not sharing products using the provided beso.ly links and share icons (see above for how to share). If you use a bookmarklet, or just grab the link from the URL bar, your publisher ID will not be included, and we won’t have any way to track your traffic and give you credit!

So how can I tell that my affiliate/publisher ID is attached to the link?
If you look at your link, you’ll see a= five or six digit number. The Beso house account is a=25225, so if you see that in your link, it means you’re not signed in.

Here’s what a link with the publisher/affiliate id embedded looks like:

Is this income taxable?
You may need to pay taxes on Beso Rewards earnings depending upon your circumstances. Shopzilla, Inc. is not responsible for any tax obligation that you may incur from your participation in the Beso Rewards Program. As the payer of earnings, Paypal should issue 1099s (and/or comparable filing for parties submitting Form W-8) for all Beso Rewards users that are US Taxpayers or Taxpaying Entities if your annual earnings meet the then-current guidelines that govern the issuance of such filings.

Am I always going to get paid what I see in my dashboard/earnings report?
In most cases, yes, Beso Rewards will pay you the earnings displayed in your Earnings Report/Dashboard. In cases where we deem the clicks to be of poor quality or even fraudulent, Beso Rewards has the absolute right to withhold payment or lower your earnings. We look at quality through a number of different facets, such as a consistently high number of clicks without any subsequent purchases.

After all, our job as the middleman between you and our merchants is to ensure that we deliver high quality traffic that converts into sales. If you’re using Beso Rewards in good faith, withholding earnings will rarely happen, but if large amounts of clicks are sent to retailers with no sales, we are occasionally forced to provide rebates, or even to remove publishers from our program so as not to undermine our relationships with our merchants. You can read more about this in theBeso Terms under the paragraph entitled “Payment & Reporting”.

Again, we truly want our users to share what they love, but we do not want our Beso fans to spam the internet or attempt to use the program simply to earn money, particularly through encouraging your friends or family to simply click on each other’s products as a way of earning money (i.e. you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours).  We frown on any use of paid marketing programs to drive traffic to Beso Rewards, social networking rings for the purposes of sharing clicks, or other tactics. Any method used that we do not view as authentic will cause a user’s Beso Rewards earnings to be shut down.

What about those FTC Endorsement Guidelines that my blogger friend mentioned to me? Does that apply to me, too?
As we understand it, the FTC Guidelines are guidelines, and we are not aware of any actions taken against bloggers or content creators. That being said, there are best practices suggested by the FTC, which are succinctly summarized in this post. In short, if you post or share Beso Rewards links on Twitter, Facebook, etc, you can simply add a hashtag such as #ad, #paid, #spon.

How can I get more clicks?
Nothing will build your influence quite as quickly or efficiently as sharing the things and products you love, in a truly organic way. Every big blog started out as a small blog: If you ask a successful blogger/content creator about how they built their following, they will invariably tell you that it takes time, and creating consistently high-quality and thoughtful content. The same holds true when you’re simply sharing the things you love: We all have influence within our spheres, so speak to the people who follow you—and other like-minded followers will come! Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Where can I find the full Beso Terms and Conditions? (Beso is part of Shopzilla Inc.)
Funny you should ask: They’re right here. By participating in the Beso Rewards program, you are agreeing to the Shopzilla Terms & Conditions. Shopzilla, Inc. operates Beso.com; the Shopzilla Publisher Program is the engine that drives Beso Rewards.

What if these FAQs don’t answer my question?
E-mail us at share@beso.com and we’ll get right back to you. You can also tweet us at @beso.

If you want to read more of our thoughts on Beso Rewards, please do so here.