Lowe’s Affiliate Program + Commission Rates
- April 17, 2024
We’re very excited to announce Geniuslink’s auto-affiliation support for the Lowe’s affiliate program! Lowe’s is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world and a Fortune 50 company. With a staggering online product catalog of over 1.2M products and 2000+ physical stores in the US and Canada, picking up online purchases in person is easier than changing the drill bit on your impact driver!
With the completion of our Lowe’s integration, it’s now easier than ever to generate a full Lowe’s affiliate link straight from their storefront.
Overview
The Lowe’s lineage traces back 99 years! According to Wikipedia, Lucius Smith Lowe opened what would become the first Lowe’s hardware store in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina back in 1921. It wasn’t until 25 years later, during the post-WW2 boom, that the company was founded as we know it today.
Looking online, Lowes.com is currently positioned as the 193rd most popular website in the world, and 55th most popular in the US. According to SimilarWeb, Lowe’s ranks 3rd in the Home & Garden category, behind IKEA and Home Depot.
Lowe’s Affiliate Program
With their massive catalog of specialized home improvement supplies and tools, the Lowes.com Affiliate Program is an excellent choice for creators and bloggers in the DIY space. Popular categories for affiliates include home appliances, power tools, home security systems, lawnmowers, and propane grills. Lowes.com offers free shipping for qualifying orders above $49, and with so many storefronts across North America, their in-store pickup option is very popular.
Just how much does Lowe’s affiliate program pay? It’s currently offering a commission rate of 2% and a 24-hour cookie window.
The Lowe’s affiliate program has been hosted on the Commission Junction (CJ) network since 2013. When we wrote our Surveying the Affiliate Landscape piece back in 2018, the Lowe’s affiliate program ranked 118th with a market share of 0.03%.
These days there are two Lowe’s online storefronts: Canada and the US. Each website has its own affiliate program hosted on the CJ Affiliate platform. During our research, we had some trouble getting reliable information on the US program. Locating the Lowes.ca Affiliate Program on the CJ Affiliate advertiser search portal was easily done, but the Lowes.com program seemed to be more difficult to track down manually. This sign up link exists, but the Lowes.com affiliate program didn’t seem to be listed when we ran a search. It’s possible the US program is more exclusive, or not being openly promoted at this time. If you have any more information about this, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Lowe’s Affiliate Program Rates and Cookie Windows
For the sake of comparison, the Amazon affiliate program offers the same 24-hour cookie window. With regards to commission rates per category, Amazon introduced the Home Improvement and Lawn & Garden categories back in April 2017 at a rate of 8% commission. The Tools category came into existence at the same time with a 5.5% commission rate. All three of these categories were hit pretty hard in the April 2020 rate changes—they’ve all been cut down to 3%. Lowe’s is offering 2% commission for all their products, but they have a much larger selection for all the categories in their niche.
Just looking at the cookie window and the commission rates alone, each program is closely matched but Amazon outperforms Lowe’s with the additional 1% commission.
According to Skimlinks, the earnings per click (EPC) is $0.05 with an average conversion rate of 1.59% and a hefty average basket size of $335.88. Traditionally we see Amazon.com’s EPC at the exact same rate. ($0.05).
Lowe’s Affiliate Signup or Login
You can learn more about the Lowe’s affiliate program directly on their website, but when you click the sign-up link you’ll be redirected to the CJ Affiliate dashboard. If you’ve already signed up with CJ Affiliate, you can log in here or use this link to apply to the Lowe’s affiliate program.
Geo-Fragmentation
Lowe’s has got a bit of a geo-fragmentation problem: the company maintains two separate storefronts for the US and Canada. The US storefront will only ship to US addresses (including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands) while Lowes.ca orders can only be shipped to destinations within Canada. As a result, this affiliate program seems to be most important for creators and marketers with a large audience in North America and the tools to correctly direct shoppers to the correct storefront
Terms & Conditions
As with any affiliate program you use, you must take the time to read and understand the affiliate program’s Terms and Conditions (sometimes known as Operating Agreement or Terms of Service). Violating these rules can get your affiliate program account shut down or commissions withheld, so it’s in your best interest to understand what’s off-limits for each program you participate in. We have been unable to procure the Terms of Service for the Lowes.com affiliate program, so we’re not able to provide a summary of them at this time. Once you’re accepted into the program the Operating Agreement should be easily viewable from within the CJ Affiliate dashboard and we strongly encourage you to review them.
Lowe’s + Geniuslink
While the Lowe’s affiliate program provides the standard suite of link generation options through the CJ Affiliate dashboard, the process of taking a product link from Lowes.com and converting it into a fully functioning affiliate link requires a few more steps than you’d prefer in your workflow.
We are pleased to announce that any Lowes.com link (not just affiliate links from CJ) can now be converted into a geni.us link using our dashboard or Chrome Extension, and we’ll always add in your affiliate tag as part of the redirect! Rest assured that your clicks will be sent to the correct destination with a properly formatted affiliate tracking link.
We have coined this process “Auto-affiliation” and it’s dead simple to configure. All you need to do is grab your Publisher Website ID, and AID (they’re both numbers) from your CJ Affiliate dashboard and input them both into the Geniuslink Affiliate page. Once we have that info, you’re done. Like magic, any geni.us link you build to a Lowes.com product will automatically have your affiliate information applied. For further guidance on how to locate your Publisher Website ID and AID and get them added to our dashboard, check out this guide in our Knowledge Base.
Please note that our support of Skimlinks also enables you to easily monetize Lowes.com links. There are multiple benefits of using Skimlinks but signing up with the Lowe’s affiliate program directly will allow you to keep 100% of your commissions earned from the program (vs. the ~ 75% that is paid out when using an affiliate aggregator like Skimlinks). At this time, the Lowe’s affiliate program does not appear to be supported by Sovrn//Commerce.
Ready to experiment with using Geniuslink with the Lowes.com affiliate program? We have two recommendations to help you get started testing the performance of Lowes.com links right away, by making some simple adjustments to your existing Amazon affiliate links.
Choice Pages
We continue to spread the good word about how providing your shoppers with real options is the right move and we’ve built out Choice Pages in support of this. These landing pages allow you to promote a single product through multiple storefronts and you’ll be able to monetize the sale no matter where your shoppers choose to purchase from. Here’s an example: geni.us/Dewalt20vmaxxr.
Our case study has shown that once you adopt Choice Pages you’ll see a boost in overall conversions and commissions. If you haven’t built any Choice Pages yet, please do yourself a favor and check out our Knowledge Base to get started.
To make setting up Choice Pages even more efficient, the Lowe’s affiliate program is now supported with our Suggestions feature. Any time you drop an Amazon link into the Choice Page UI—or search by product title—we’ll search for that same product on Lowe’s and automatically add it to a list of retailers that you can include as Choice Page options with just a few clicks of your mouse!
With a Choice Page, you can place Amazon and Lowe’s affiliate links next to each other in a clean, intuitive format to further optimize your affiliate revenue and better support the preferences of your unique audience. This protects you from having to make an “either / or” decision about promoting Lowe’s instead of Amazon—and from our research, this seems to increase your total revenue!
A/B Split Links
For plenty of affiliates, the Amazon.com Associates program is the default choice for monetizing US-based traffic. We would encourage you to run some experiments to discern if that’s truly the best performing option for your audience and content niche. Geniuslink’s A/B Split Test links provide a process for you to closely track the performance of two or more affiliate programs.
Just click this test link a few times and observe the end destination: geni.us/GoogleNest
Using an A/B Split Test link allows you to compare the earnings of Amazon’s affiliate program to the Lowe’s affiliate program without publishing an additional link. Once your test is complete, you can use this data to evaluate whether you would benefit from replacing your Amazon affiliate links with another affiliate program entirely.
Conclusion
We’re cooking with gas now! In the last month, we’ve introduced support for monetizing your links via auto-affiliation for nearly 10 different affiliate programs, and we have no intention of stopping any time soon!
If you find that you’re really leaning into the housewares and home furnishings space, please check out our support for the Wayfair Affiliate Program as well.
We look forward to hearing your feedback about the nuances and benefits of how to use the Lowe’s Affiliate Program with Geniuslink. Let us know what you think!
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