Merchants or Brands? Find the Right Products Faster

When navigating Affiliate.com’s extensive dataset of over one billion affiliate products, you will come across two key terms: merchant and brand.

These terms serve distinct roles and understanding their purpose helps refine your search and get you closer to finding the exact product(s) you are interested in.

What is a Merchant?

A merchant is the retailer that sells a product. Merchants can host their affiliate program on affiliate networks and partner with publishers who earn commissions for driving sales.

Merchants range from small businesses to large global corporations and span across many industries including e-commerce, technology, travel, etc.

Affiliate.com supports over 17,000 merchants including Walmart, Dick's Sporting Goods, and The Home Depot.

What is a Brand?

A brand is the company that manufactures or owns the product. Brands typically have their products sold and distributed by one or more merchants.

Just like merchants, brands range from small businesses to large global corporations and span across many industries including e-commerce, technology, travel, etc.

Affiliate.com supports tens of thousands of brands.

Merchant vs. Brands: What's the Difference?

A single merchant can offer products from multiple brands. For example, Home Depot (merchant) sells items from DeWalt (brand), LG (brand), and Whirlpool (brand).

On the other hand, some merchants exclusively sell their own products. Apple, for instance, is both the merchant and the brand, selling only Apple products.

How to search for Merchants and Brands on Affiliate.com

When you search for a product on Affiliate.com, the returned results include both the merchant and the brand for that product.

You can further optimize your results by searching for a specific merchant using the merchant filter.

For example, use the merchant filter to see only products supported by the merchant, Dyson.

Or, opt to search for a brand's product across one or multiple merchants. For example, Dyson's products are sold across various merchants such as Walmart, Sephora, Macy's, etc.

To learn more, visit https://www.affiliate.com/programmatic-apis.