The Study of Affiliate Marketing: From the Context of Malaysian SMEs

Affiliate marketing is a network-based e-commerce strategy which has attracted extraordinary attention both in theory and practice over the past few years. All web-oriented firms can benefit from this strategy with full understanding of its mechanism and strategic planning. However, in spite of this fact, in developing markets the state of understanding and managerial attention to this context is still at a low level which negatively affects the strategic development of e-commerce in the society as a whole system. For instance in Malaysia, although e-commerce is being applied, but there is no prior work devoted to affiliate marketing of service SMEs in particular ICT sector firms. This lack of knowledge in the literature poses a challenge for decision makers and policy implementers.