How Affiliate Marketing Works, and How We Earn Money

The question we get asked most often

People who use a coupon site regularly eventually ask the same question: if it costs nothing to use, how does it stay online? The honest answer is affiliate marketing. It is a normal part of how online retail works, used by shops, comparison sites, coupon sites and many publishers, and there is nothing hidden about how it functions. This article explains the mechanism in plain terms, and describes how it applies to daily-coupons.info specifically.

What affiliate marketing actually is

A retailer that wants more visitors to become buyers can offer a commission to sites that send it customers. Instead of paying for advertising space regardless of results, the retailer only pays when a link actually leads to a completed order. That arrangement is managed through an affiliate network, a company that sits between retailers and publishers, tracks which click led to which order, and handles the payment. Most large retailers run a programme like this, and most price comparison, review and coupon sites take part in one.

The path a click actually takes

When you click a shop link or a voucher code button on our site, four things happen in sequence.

• The click goes through the affiliate network first, which attaches a tracking parameter, then forwards you to the retailer's own website within a second or two.
• You browse and buy on the retailer's site exactly as you would if you had typed the address yourself. Nothing about the shop's checkout, prices or payment process changes because of the link you used.
• If you complete an order, the retailer's system records that it arrived through our tracking link and reports the sale back to the network.
• The network confirms the order was not cancelled or returned within the retailer's usual return period, and only then credits the commission to us.

That last step matters: a commission is not paid the moment someone clicks, and not even the moment they pay. It is paid weeks later, after the retailer's return window has passed and the sale is confirmed as final.

Why the price you pay does not change

The commission comes out of the retailer's own marketing budget, the same budget that would otherwise go to search adverts or social media campaigns. It is not added on top of the product price, and there is no separate step where a shop raises a price to cover it. Buying through our link costs exactly what buying directly on the retailer's site costs. If you want to check this yourself, comparing the price on our link against the price after typing the shop's address directly will show the same figure.

How we decide which shops and codes to list

We currently list 527 shops across 22 countries and 18 languages, and check the codes several times a day because they expire or get replaced without warning. Which shops appear, and how they are grouped by category, is based on relevance to the markets and languages we cover, not on how much commission a given retailer pays. A shop that pays a lower commission is not pushed down the list, and one that pays more is not moved up. Codes that stop working are removed regardless of which retailer issued them.

What we do not do

To be clear about the parts of this that sometimes get assumed rather than checked: we do not currently offer cashback, there is no account or registration on daily-coupons.info, and the portal itself does not set cookies to track visitors. The only tracking involved happens at the moment you click through to a retailer, when the affiliate network briefly records that the click came from us, the same mechanism used across the industry, not something specific to our pages. Whether you think of it as a voucher code or a coupon code, entering it before you pay is what triggers both the discount at the shop and, on our side, the record that the order started with a click on our site. You can read more about the mechanics on our how it works page, or see who we are on the about us page.

Why this model works for shoppers too

Because the retailer only pays for completed sales, it has an incentive to keep its own commission programme running rather than dropping it after a quiet month, which means the codes and links stay reliable over time. For shoppers, the practical result is a free page to check before paying, browsable across categories without creating an account, where the only thing that changes at checkout is whether a working code was applied, never the underlying price.