The Enhanced Affiliate Registration and Management System Defined:

The enhanced affiliate registration and management system is designed to provide a greater understanding of whom everyone is working with inside of our network. LinkShare's enhanced affiliate registration and management system raises the bar for Affiliate Marketing as well as set the stage for our consolidated payment and direct deposit service designed to benefit all members of the LinkShare Network.

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Capabilities

We are introducing two new concepts with this system as a move towards improving your visibility into your LinkShare affiliate channel. The first concept is that of an "affiliate legal entity;" a master account that all affiliates must register with LinkShare. Affiliates who fail to register their legal entity will not receive payments under the new system. Affiliates that have multiple accounts will aggregate their accounts under this one legal entity which will pave the way to future enhancements that will allow you to better understand your affiliate program.

The definition of an affiliate legal entity in our system also enables a truly unique feature during the affiliate registration process: real-time validation and authentication of the key data that identifies an affiliate legal entity against a third party system. This process will apply to all new and existing U.S. based affiliates and any changes these affiliates make to their account profiles on a going forward basis.

The second concept this system introduces is that of an affiliate "channel" which represents the method that affiliates use to promote your business. Affiliate Channel categories will include web-site, e-mail, browser plug-in, blog, search, or mobile. An affiliate can select one or more of these categories as they apply to its business. This information will enable you to evaluate affiliates more effectively.

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Benefits:

The above capabilities benefit our merchants in numerous ways:

1. Building Upon the Quality of the Network:
   The validation and authentication of affiliates will enable merchants to be more certain of the identity of affiliates and provides a unique identity for our affiliates. Merchants will be better equipped to stay ahead of any questionable activity.
2. More Effective Affiliate Communication:
   All affiliates will have updated and verified contact information so merchants can be more effective in reaching out to their partners.
3. Better Visibility:
   This new system will enable LinkShare to roll-out additional capabilities in the future. The aggregation of the multiple affiliate channels under one entity will eventually provide merchants with a deeper understanding of their affiliates' marketing methods.

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Instructions:

There will be some steps that we will need you and your affiliates to be aware of.

1. Affiliate Registration Page Standardization:
   In order to provide the above capabilities, all new and existing affiliates will need to follow a consistent registration process. As a result, LinkShare will no longer support custom formatting of the registration pages. LinkShare will automatically redirect the affiliate registration link located on merchants' websites to the new registration page. Merchants do not need to change any links. Please note we will no longer support merchant hosted registration pages. Hence your will have to update your web site to link to the new registration page, https://ssl.linksynergy.com/php-bin/reg/sregister.shtml?mid=XXXX&no_r=1. Please be sure to replace the XXXX with your merchant ID (MID).
2. Reminding Affiliates to Register:
   LinkShare will also ask you for your assistance in reminding all affiliates to please update their registration as soon as possible. All existing affiliates must register a legal entity so that we can be certain any payments from you are going to a valid business entity. LinkShare will allow existing affiliates to continue to manage their LinkShare accounts. However, beginning in May, we will not pay the affiliate until their information has been updated and verified.
3. Getting Ready for Consolidated Payments:
   These features are the first step in the launch of consolidated affiliate payments and ACH. Given the size of the program powered by the LinkShare system, it is important for us to have the most sophisticated process in place to screen affiliates.

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Additional Questions:

Who can merchants contact for questions?
Please contact your LinkShare representative for questions.

Who can affiliates contact for questions?
If you are contacted by affiliates that are having trouble with this change, please forward them to a special email address for questions regarding this new registration process. That address is newreg@linkshare.com.

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