Affiliate and influencer programs for research suppliers

When an affiliate or influencer promotes your products, what they say can become your responsibility. The FTC's Endorsement Guides say advertisers can be liable for misleading or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements, and for failing to disclose material connections with endorsers. For a research supplier, that means every promoter is effectively writing copy for your store, often for an audience you do not sell to. If you run a program at all, set written rules, require clear disclosure, monitor what promoters publish and act quickly when they break the rules.

Why third-party promoters create risk for you

Under the Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR Part 255, an endorsement is any advertising, marketing or promotional message that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions of someone other than the advertiser. The Guides say an advertiser can be liable for a deceptive endorsement even when the endorser is not, and that advertisers should guide endorsers, monitor them and take action to remedy non-compliance.

The FTC's guidance on its Endorsement Guides adds that delegating part of a promotional program to an outside company does not relieve you of responsibility, and that advertisers need reasonable programs to train and monitor members of their network. Its health products guidance makes the same point with an example: a marketer that pays a blogger can be liable for the blogger's misleading claims, and the paid relationship must be disclosed.

For a research supply store, the risk goes beyond disclosure. Promoters tend to write for a general audience and talk about outcomes, which is exactly the content your own pages avoid. A single post describing personal use, linked to your store with your code, puts that content next to your name. See claims to remove from a research supply store.

Decide whether to run a program at all

Many influencer audiences are made up mostly of members of the public. If you sell only to qualified business and research buyers, a program that sends you consumer traffic works against your own buyer checks. Before starting, ask:

• Who is this promoter's audience, and are they the buyers you serve?
• Would you be comfortable if a payment reviewer read everything this promoter has published about your products?
• Do you have the time to monitor what promoters publish, not just what they sign up to?

If the honest answer to any of these is no, a program may not fit your business. Referral arrangements with laboratory suppliers, industry publications or conference sponsors may fit better than social media influencers.

FTC disclosure basics

Where you do work with promoters, they need to disclose the relationship. From the FTC's materials:

• When to disclose. The FTC's guide for influencers says to disclose any financial, employment, personal or family relationship with a brand, and not to assume followers already know.
• What counts as a connection. The Endorsement Guides say material connections can include payment or free or discounted products, whether or not a review is required in return.
• How to disclose. Disclosures should be clear and conspicuous, hard to miss and placed with the endorsement itself. The FTC's guidance says a single disclosure on a home page is not enough, and that a disclosure reached only through a hyperlink is easily avoided.
• Affiliate links. The FTC's guidance notes that consumers might not understand that the phrase "affiliate link" means the person is being paid, and suggests that a label such as "paid link" next to the link may be adequate.
• No claims you cannot support. The influencer guide says promoters cannot make up claims about a product that would require proof the advertiser does not have.

Write the rules down

Give every promoter a written agreement and guidelines before they publish anything. The FTC's guidance suggests giving members of a network a list of the claims they can make for your products. For a research supplier, that list should be short and factual. A workable set of guidelines covers:

• Permitted content: product identity, form, purity and documentation, copied from your own pages.
• Prohibited content: anything about use on people or animals, health, wellness, fitness, weight, appearance, sexual or performance claims, personal stories or results, and comparisons with medicines.
• Audience: content aimed at research and business buyers, not the general public.
• Disclosure: the exact disclosure wording and placement you expect on each platform.
• Codes and links: promoters link to your store only. They do not take orders, accept payment for your products or run their own storefronts selling them.
• Approval: whether you review content before it goes live.
• Consequences: what happens if the rules are broken, up to and including ending the relationship and withholding commission on affected sales.

Monitor what promoters publish

The FTC's guidance says the scope of monitoring depends on risk, and that a network promoting health-related products may need closer supervision than one promoting, say, a fashion line. It lists periodically searching for what members of your network are saying as part of a reasonable program. In practice:

1. Keep a list of every active promoter, their channels and their codes.
2. Review a sample of each promoter's recent posts on a set schedule, and every new promoter's first posts in full.
3. Search for your store name, product names and promoter codes to find content you were not told about.
4. Check that disclosures are present and placed with the endorsement.
5. Compare orders that use promoter codes against your buyer profile. A code that brings in consumer orders tells you something about its audience.
6. Record what you checked, what you found and what you did about it.

Act on problems

When you find a breach, ask the promoter to remove or correct the content, set a short deadline and confirm it was done. Remove the promoter from the program if it happens again or if the content is serious. Keep a record of each request and outcome. If a promoter will not remove content, record that too and stop paying commission.

How this fits with the rest of your program

Promoters are one more channel where your store's message can drift, alongside discount codes and promotions and old blog posts. Rules and monitoring reduce the risk; they do not remove your responsibility, and they do not decide how a payment processor views your business. Stripe and the card networks make their own decisions. Speak to a qualified lawyer about your obligations. Claddr checks buyer type, credentials and ship-to at checkout and stops consumers with a clear message, whatever link brought them there. See Claddr for research-use-only suppliers.